Marta Pulini

Italian comfort food sits at the center of Marta Pulini’s work, but the form changes by setting: restaurant table, catering, tapas-style menus, and family-style service. The craft here is not a clean break between projects so much as a practiced move between formats of hospitality, with the same attention to rhythm, scale, and the way food lands in a room.

Modern Italian home cooking is the frame for Franceschetta 58, where Marta Pulini works as Executive Chef. The food is described in terms of balance rather than reinvention: familiar without being pinned to nostalgia, rooted without losing contact with the present. That is the trade skill on show here — taking a recognizable vocabulary and keeping it legible, direct, and current. Bibendum extends that same hospitality into a catering register.

As founder and manager, Marta Pulini links the seated meal in Modena with a more mobile, event-based form of service. The work between the two settings is part of the point: one room, one service, one table do not contain the whole practice, which also depends on shaping how people gather and how a meal is received outside the restaurant. Sharing plates in an Italian context is not treated here as an easy sell. Marta Pulini’s line — “In Italy it is not so easy.” — names the cultural resistance plainly.

The follow-up is equally plain: “Eventually they try it, and they always like it.” The position is practical, not promotional; the issue is not whether people understand the format immediately, but whether the food and the setting can carry them there.

Marta's signature dishes include Swordfish with a fennel & orange salad. The dish works through contrast and clarity: fish, citrus, and fennel arranged in a way that reads cleanly and generously, without leaning on excess to make its point.