Giulio de Monte Gaspardo, a former Bottega sommelier, opened Polenta Trattoria Friuliana at 803 Fillmore St in the old Alamo Square Seafood Grill space — the city's only restaurant dedicated to the cooking of Friuli.

Giulio de Monte Gaspardo registered his restaurant with the City nearly a year before anyone could eat there. Polenta LLC filed at 803 Fillmore St on Oct. 1, 2025, in the DataSF business rolls↗ (external source, opens in a new tab); the doors opened roughly seven months later. Today Polenta Trattoria Friuliana runs mid-block near Grove in Alamo Square, in the storefront that last held the Alamo Square Seafood Grill.

What Gaspardo is selling is narrow on purpose. Friuli-Venezia Giulia — a corner of fewer than a million people, pinned between the Alps and the Adriatic against the Austrian and Slovenian borders — is a region most diners in San Francisco have never knowingly eaten from. Polenta is the only room in the city devoted to it. The operator knows the local field: he poured wine as a sommelier at Bottega, the Yountville restaurant, before taking his own lease, and he still works the floor as host and steward.

The kitchen's anchor is frico, Friuli's potato-and-Montasio griddle cake, alongside a run of house egg-noodle pastas that rotate often — purcit in pork-sausage ragù, granc with crab and capers, tajadeis with cauliflower and truffle butter. Gaspardo pushes the region's whites: the mineral vitovska, the almond-finish friulano. Those menu details, and Gaspardo's own account of the room, were reported this week by senior food reporter Astrid Kane in The San Francisco Standard's Eat Here Now column.

The bet fits a city that already slices Italy thin — La Ciccia for Sardinia, A16 for the Puglia-to-Campania road, Che Fico for Rome's Jewish quarter. Gaspardo is wagering there's room on a residential block for one more region nobody else here cooks. The space is small and loud, tables tight — the terms of a neighborhood trattoria, chosen rather than apologized for.