Jonathon Sawyer, the award-winning chef behind Greenhouse Tavern and Noodlecat, is opening a new restaurant with his wife Amelia. The venue, to be called Trentina, will feature cuisine from the Trento region of northern Italy, where Amelia's family is from. It will open in the former Sergio's space in University Circle in the coming months.

Sawyer describes Trentina as a "passion project" that will allow him to pay tribute to his wife's heritage while introducing the cuisine of Northern Italy to a wider audience.

"I always had an affinity with 'the Boot,' as it were," he says. "When I started Bar Cento, it was really a Roman restaurant in the style of the street mongers of Rome. I didn’t want to repeat that, but I knew my wife’s family had tie-ins with Trento."

He traveled there and fell in love. "We subsequently returned -- more than 100 days in past four years, in fact. The thing I keep coming back to is how similar the growing seasons are in Trento and the Cuyahoga Valley. The indigenous people are very similar to the ethnic backgrounds of a lot of Clevelanders; there's Austrian, Swiss, Slovenian… so much more so than just straight-up Italian."

To help fund the restaurant and pay for some extras like a pasta extruder, wood-burning grill and double-sided hearth, Sawyer launched a Kickstarter campaign. The original goal was $21,999, but the project already has exceeded that amount by nearly $10,000 with 18 days still left to go.

So Sawyer set a new, loftier goal: "We want to be the most-funded hospitality Kickstarter campaign in Ohio, whatever that is," he jokes.

Sawyer certainly has earned his fan club, but the campaign rewards also don't hurt. For $100, you can take a cooking class that normally would cost $150. Three hundred bucks buys a cocktail named after you, while $600 gets you meals shipped to your home for six months. The list goes on and on, all the way up to dinner at your house for 20 of "your foodiest friends and family," cooked by the chef himself ($500).

Trentina will offer fine dining with showy tableside service like polenta seared over burning embers. Sawyer says, "For us, it will be the first time we'll be able to accurately portray cuisine with ingredients from just outside our back door."

Source: Jonathon Sawyer
Writer: Lee Chilcote