Spaghetti tossed off the heat with raw sea urchin roe, garlic, oil and a little pasta water so the coral melts into a sauce rather than cooking into a paste. Alguerès calls the urchin bogamarì.

Sea urchin has been eaten on the Alghero quays for as long as anyone has fished them, split with a knife and scooped out with bread while still dripping. The pasta version is a restaurant refinement of that habit, and the town still runs a spring rassegna named for the urchin at the port fish market. Pressure on the stock changed the picture. The Sardinian regional government now fixes the harvest window by decree each year, reserving it to licensed professional fishermen, closing the season in spring and capping the weekly take, so the dish is genuinely seasonal and disappears from menus for months at a time.

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