South Bank’s Otto restaurant isn’t cheap, but it’s just about always excellent value, and nothing exemplifies that better than this spectacular dish.
Otto Brisbane isn’t cheap. But it is good value.
That statement might seem counterintuitive when you can easily walk out of this South Bank restaurant having paid well in excess of $400 for two people. But an experienced diner will likely look down at their itemised bill, shrug and think, “Yep, worth it”.
Nothing on this upmarket Italian’s menu captures its penchant for high-end value like its champagne lobster spaghettini. This thing clocks in at $55 for an entree and $75 for a main, but we’d wager it’s worth every penny. And whether you think of it as expensive perhaps depends on your love of lobster (more on that later).
Served with garlic, chilli, white wine, lemon butter and bottarga, something this divine shouldn’t be this simple. But its original appearance on the menu at Otto also signified a changing attitude towards seafood in this city, both in demand and supply.
Head chef Will Cowper introduced the dish as a special back in 2018 or 2019 – he can’t remember exactly when.
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“Champagne lobster was first brought to me by Jules [Crocker] from Joto Fresh Fish [in Sydney],” Cowper says. “When I first came to Brisbane, I felt seafood was a bit forgotten about. All the good seafood was caught in Queensland but bypassed Brisbane to go to Sydney or Melbourne.
“So I used Jules to send stuff directly to me. Eventually, he put the champagne lobster in front of me.”
The other timely aspect of the spaghettini? The lobster was bycatch, and Cowper’s invention of the dish signposted a greater industry interest in utilising seafood that would have traditionally been discarded.
“Eventually, it got to a point where I said to Jules, ‘I want to put this on permanently. How much can you get?’” Cowper says. “He was, like, ‘It’s not that simple’. But eventually, it was him working with the fishers and saying, ‘we’ll take everything you can get’, and it stayed that way.”
These days, Otto’s chefs shift between four and five tonnes of champagne lobster a year, so they order it pre-processed to more easily separate the heads and shells for a stock.
Otherwise, it’s a relatively simple dish based on a traditional aglio e olio, Cowper sauteing off some chilli and garlic in olive oil, before deglazing the pan with white wine, and adding the stock.
“Then we add the pasta and the lobster, and then the butter, then some dill and parsley, and we finish it with bottarga. It might surprise some people how fast it comes together in the kitchen.”
Expensive pastas are often big and bold, but Cowper’s dish is about getting out of the way of the gentle sweetness of the lobster. It’s refined and delicate, the bottarga providing just the right amount of punch, the lemon butter just viscous enough to allow the spaghettini to easily twirl around the fork and give the dish a luscious mouthfeel.
It’s a spectacular piece of cooking, perfectly pitched both on the plate and for Otto’s priceless waterside location.
“Rock lobster pastas can often range up to $300, so I think ours is quite reasonably priced,” Cowper says. “And we haven’t really changed that price. It’s always been around that $70 mark for a main course.
“Some might not understand that price, but what’s inside the dish is what it’s all about. Everything I do is about getting the best-quality produce for our guests. It’s lobster pasta that’s accessible, and I think it’s a steal.”
Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
