People who say you can never have too much of a good thing just haven't tried hard enough.
Mark Manger
Chef and tell: Frank Bonanno ups the ante, and the
flavors, at Luca D'Italia.
Location Info
Details
711 Grant
Street
303-832-6600
Hour
s: 5-10 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday
Prosciutto di San Daniele:
$7
Meatballs: $7
Octopus:
$8
Bresaola: $8
Lobster fra
diavola: $11
Carbonara:
$7
Wild boar pappardelle:
$8
Potato gnocchi:
$10
Prawns: $23
Chicken
piccata: $17
Rabbit, three
ways: $18
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It's Saturday night -- technically Sunday morning, but not by much -- and I am lying on my back in the middle of my living room, all the lights out, with my arms and legs splayed like a man carelessly run down and left for dead by an out-of-control mathematical proof that one person most certainly can have too much of a good thing. My belly is bloated over the top of my favorite party jeans. And I smell bad, like something a pig found buried in an alley behind a wine bar, like overpriced Italian Chianti, cigarettes and the intoxicating, powerful and dirty funk of truffles.
White truffles, specifically. Good ones. Not quite as strong and a little less delicate than their black cousins, but still powerful stuff. If a mushroom junkie were to break into my house right now and sniff me, he could probably tell exactly what variety of truffles I'd overindulged in -- white Piedmont, black Umbrian, you name it -- because the stink is oozing from my pores and rolling off me in waves. But I live in a good neighborhood now, not the kind of place where roving gangs of unemployed fungologists go around breaking into people's houses, so I am confident that I'll be left alone with my misery.
It was the "rabbit, three ways" at Luca d'Italiathat did this to me.
No, that's not fair. It was me that did this to me. It was me eating at least part of each of the eleven courses that came my way previous to the rabbit that did it. But it was the rabbit that put me over the edge. Had chef/owner Frank Bonanno and his team of white-coated pushers in the kitchen chosen to serve rabbit just one way, I would have been fine. Two ways? I still might have made my way to bed without collapsing into a moaning, evil-smelling lump in the middle of the living room. But three ways was simply one way too many.
The game had been to get my mom to eat three weird things -- three things she'd never eaten before and would probably never even consider eating under normal circumstances -- before the dessert menus hit the table. It would be fun, I figured. My folks are not reckless eaters. Never have been, probably never will be. They are solid, upstanding suburban omnivores, fully satisfied for years with the classic meat-and-potatoes American diet before recently giving that up for on-again/off-again vegetarianism. And even this was a radical departure for them, so when we talk on the phone, they are sometimes justifiably confused and horrified by the things that I eat. And even more so that someone pays me to do it. Well, he didn't learn it from us, I can sometimes hear my mom telling her friends when I write about eating fish eyes or deer penis. I had no intention of having them eat anything that strange, just something new. Something different. This was their vacation -- their first trip out to Denver to visit me, the prodigal son now made good as a restaurant critic -- and I wanted them to have a memorable meal.
Which was why I chose the seven-month-old Luca for our big dinner out: Frank Bonanno doesn't cook anything that's not memorable.
Bonanno is obsessed. We've spent hours on the phone gabbing about nothing but fish. Or liver. We like a lot of the same restaurants, are pissed off by a lot of the same chefs. He cooked for me (while I was disguised in a rubber Nixon mask and blaze-orange tuxedo) earlier this year at a Steel Chef competition, laughing maniacally as he put out plate after plate of stunning grub and soundly trouncing his challenger. Bonanno is one of the good guys -- a serious, old-school restaurant lifer not made for doing anything else, totally mad for ingredients, bonkers over high-quality product, and crazy for prep and recipes that showcase these at their best.
What's more, he's fearless. Unafraid to take risks and put things he loves on his menus that maybe no one in his right mind would pay money to eat.
Lucky for him, there are plenty of diners in Denver these days fully in their wrong minds. Luckier still, I'm one of them. Even luckier than that, I'd brought guests.
Luca's menu is designed for gluttonous abandon, arranged for wild flights of pairing and sharing, set up in an attempt to make people eat the way the Italians do -- with several courses of small plates leading up to the entrees. The portions are small, the plating simple, the combinations divine. If you absolutely refuse to eat the way they want you to, they will do it your way, right away, just like Burger King. But the house won't be happy about it.
To begin, an amuse from the kitchen that set the tone for the night and gave us -- my parents, my wife and me -- something to nibble on while we perused the short, compact wine list and sprawling menu. At first look, the amuse was just an open-faced egg-salad sandwich. Only it wasn't, because egg-salad sandwiches are soggy things that moms make on chewy white bread with the crusts cut off. This, on the other hand, was egg and truffled mayonnaise mounded up on a crusty, toasted piece of bruschetta. It was not the kind of thing you give your kid to eat while he sits on the couch watching Thundar the Barbarian cartoons on TV, but it was exactly what you want brought to your table by a young, well-educated waiter (okay, he pronounced bruschetta as "broosketti," but that's forgivable in a restaurant where almost every menu description has at least one misspelling) while you sit in an abstractedly hip dining room burning under the nuclear glow of the orange-on-orange walls, hung with orange-on-orange art (courtesy of Bonanno's partner, Doug Fleischmann, who died in a car accident this summer), trying to eavesdrop on all of the conversations around you as the two- and four-tops crowding the joint swoon over some dishes, puzzle over others. It was grown-up comfort food, done simply and with a weird sense of humor. It was Bonanno through and through.
