Get the latest food, drinks and things to do news directly to your inbox. Subscribe Now
At Fortuna, the question is what you want your dirty martini dirty with. Starting Saturday, November 14, the East Village restaurant is teaming up with The Pickle Guys for a $20 pickle martini flight. The launch falls on National Pickle Day, right on the nose!, and the flight will be available exclusively at Fortuna for one month.
A bit about the kosher certification: Fortuna’s team describes the restaurant as kosher-certified. Its previous certificate listed glatt kosher meat supervision under Rabbi Zev Schwarcz’s International Kosher Council and expired October 31. The current certificate and its coverage of the flight and fries are still unverified.
Back to the deal, which gets you three mini martinis and ten brines to choose from. Each drink is garnished with the corresponding pickle, so if you order the okra martini, you’ll get a piece of pickled okra with it. Alongside the brines from The Pickle Guys, Fortuna is offering its own shifka, a pickled hot pepper. Fries are $5 extra, which makes it $25 to see how well a round of pickle martinis goes with a plate of fries.
The Pickle Guys are known for their extravagant takes on pickles—the pineapple variety available at Fortuna starting this month, for example, is part of a lineup that also includes mango and Brussels sprouts, But adding the creations to martinis sounds pretty genius. The mini format also adds excitement to it all as you get to try all the creations without committing your entire drink order to a preference.
The New Yorkness of the collaboration is also a plus. The Pickle Guys, after all, describe themselves as the last pickle shop on Essex Street, once home to a concentration of pickle sellers, and they still cure pickles in barrels of salt brine with garlic and spices, a process that can take up to three months.
When visiting Fortuna, we suggest starting with the shifka and saving a fry for the pineapple. If the pineapple turns out to be your favorite, you know where to get a jar.
