It’s a real mess hall
Forget tablecloths. This eater y covers your table with polenta
FORTINA’S new special begins with a server spilling food right on top of your table, without a dish in sight. A massive pot of steaming, cheesy polenta is dumped straight onto one of the Italian restaurant’s long seating areas.
Next comes the woodfired asparagus and broccolini, slow-roasted pork, meatballs and entire femurs full of goopy bone marrow. Each is plopped onto the polenta until the table looks like a giant, edible Jackson Pollock painting. That’s when patrons scoop the contents onto their plates, which have finally been brought out.
Fortina, an Italian restaurant with locations in New York and Connecticut, usually serves pasta and pizza. But starting this week at its downtown Brooklyn location, it will begin offering its Polenta Table, a $55-per- person spectacle served on a specially prepared wooden table that’s been sealed, then sprayed between servings with a food-grade sanitizer.
“When was the last time you ate something right off the table?” asks Fortina chef Christian Petroni, who conceived the dish and is set to compete on “Food Network Star” on Sunday. “There’s something about sharing a meal with people you care about — it sticks with you.”
Polenta, a cheesy corn porridge, has long been a canvas for family-style Italian meals, both in Italy and among generations of Italian-Americans. Petroni, a Bronx native who spent summers in Northern Italy with his Italian-American family, observed the tradition on a trip to the homeland as a teenager.
“It stuck with me,” says Petroni, now living in Westchester with his wife and infant son. As he grew up, he appreciated how potluck dinners often involved a base of polenta — “and everyone would just kind of bring the leftovers they had to put on top of it.”
Fortina’s meal can be prepared for as many or as few customers as necessary, and toppings may change with the seasons. Either way, the Polenta Table has to be ordered 48 hours in advance by phone or e-mail.