I’d say “what Laura Shunk said,” because I completely agree with her take on the dish I first had at a sake-pairing dinner at OTOTO a few weeks back—but that would be lazy. Which I am, but not that lazy.

By “first had,” I mean first had here in Denver; back in Boston, I came to love sea urchin pasta at Taranta, a Southern Italian–Peruvian restaurant run by a chef very dear to my heart, José Duarte, whose version combined spaghetti with a velvety sauce enriched by the shellfish along with shavings of bottarga—fish eggs (usually those of tuna or mullet) cured & compressed into a cake. The result was at once soothing & sharply pungent, like smoking a cigarette on the ocean floor.

With the use of risotto rather than long noodles, Ototo Den’s version is of course creamier by virtue of the risotto, the urchin playing an even more yolk-like role texturally; still, its musty, iodine-tinged savor—think of uni as the pickled forest mushroom of the sea—mingles & tingles.