Mark Fuller of Spring Hill
BY AMY PENNINGTON
PHOTOS BY KENNETH DUNDAS
In a tiny restaurant with only 66 seats, nine people are in the kitchen, silently working. Hunched over cutting boards, turning pans over flames on a hot stove, running blenders and putting away boxes of fresh produce, this team of cooks is well choreographed. No one is working furiously or causing a ripple in the silent meditation of prep work. It is an incredibly organized pre-dinner dance that is awe-inspiring to watch.
At Spring Hill, the menu is labor intensive and it demands both attention and capable hands. “We don’t want to compromise (the food), and we want cooks to take the time to do it right,” explains Mark Fuller, chef and owner, justifying the additional hands. “They are able to slow it down and make sure it’s done well,” and in that sentiment lies the beauty and heart of the restaurant.
Chef Fuller is piping puréed Walla Walla onions into tidy rings on a sheet pan. With his head down, jaw set with determination, he is finessing an onion ring recipe for the new tasting menu. Onion rings are fairly pedestrian food (Spring Hill serves them alongside their quarter-pound burger) but for the tasting menu something more dainty is needed.
He is developing a more elegant onion ring that addresses the Achilles’ heel of the entire species—crafting the recipe so the entire onion doesn’t slide right out of the batter when you have a bite. It’s pretty precious work for a chef getting ready for a Friday night dinner service. “It is the first time I’ve tried it this way,” he admitted and smiled, still piping.
Whereas other restaurants in this city have made a name for themselves serving rustic, hearty dishes, Spring Hill has bent the other direction and instead focuses on detail and technique to compose more refined versions of classically comforting dishes. It is a fine balancing act between keeping what’s on the plate simple and still incorporating small edits to recipes that keep food inventive and interesting. Take, for example, the popular and unexpected bouillabaisse consommé—a shallow bowl of slightly chilled fish and shellfish surrounded by a cool broth of tomato water. Each tomato-scented spoonful is at once familiar and surprising. The appeal of Fuller’s cooking is that this balance need not be stuffy and unapproachable—and stuffy would be easy to slip into when you start getting precious about onion rings.
Simply put, he would love for people “to wonder why the meal is good,” but not be able to put their finger on it. The kitchen does plenty over-thinking on their own. Lined up on the work space in the immaculate and sparkling kitchen are various notebooks—each cook keeps their own (not due to encouragement, but rather an unspoken model that everyone now follows). Mark’s personal notebook of recipes is on its third incarnation. The first one “fell in the sink and got all wet.” Notebooks are used to transfer and catalog recipes and are individually updated by each cook.
Notable in the kitchen at Spring Hill is the female majority. Out of twelve cooks on staff, a bit over half are woman. Xuan Che is the petite but stern sous chef keeping everything in order. She is second in command and meticulous. The common thread amongst the cook team is their passion and dedication. “They cook their asses off every night,” Mark says.
Mark, too, has paid some dues. A high school drop out, he worked toward his GED in order to apply at the Culinary Institute of America, where he was readily accepted. The year-old Spring Hill (owned by Mark and wife/business partner Marjorie Chang Fuller) has lined up an impressive assortment of national acclaim, from Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs to Bon Appetit’s Top 10 Best New Restaurants in America.
Not one to rest of his laurels, Mark is constantly reading and thinking about food. He peruses old cookbooks, newspaper and magazines in search of inspiration, calling out The Joy of Cooking and the Time-Life Good Cook series, which contains 30 single-ingredient specialty books, as favorites. Recently, he has begun playing with the technique of slow cooking and vacuum-sealing. Pressing fruit between a sealed plastic layer breaks down it’s cellular walls. Fruit comes out sweet and translucent. At the peak of summer, Mark applied this technique to a lightly sugared honeydew melon. Holding the pressed melon up to the light, membranes in the spine are perfectly visible, tracing bright green rivers of color through the fruit.
With ease and skill, Fuller wraps the small square of fruit with a thin ribbon of house-made pork lardo that is then melted with a blow torch. Using the fine tip of his chef knife, he plates the bite onto a small spoon for serving. A cook, Tyler, comes over and asks for a taste. Cook to cook, they exchange some notes on flavor and look before Tyler heads back to his station, but not before calling out a simple two word explanation that can be applied across the board to everything Spring Hill and Chef Fuller seem to accomplish: “Bitchin’, dude”
Spring Hill
4437 California Ave SW
Seattle, Washington 98116
www.springhillnorthwest.com
Amy Pennington keeps her kitchen notebook within arm’s reach on top of her fridge. To see what else is on her plate, visit amy-pennington.com/go-go-green-garden
For Mark Fuller’s Roasted Mussels with Parsley and Lemon recipe, click here