Osteria Marco

But on a first, early visit to Osterio Marco, my server seemed completely mystified by the way the menu was supposed to work. To my way of thinking, Bonanno's menu is near perfect, with cheese and salumi and antipasti taking up more than half the board, the rest occupied by pizzas and paninis made with rotisserie meats. You're supposed to get a little of this and a little of that — but a portion of salame off the slicer was simply too skimpy, and I could have skipped the burnt bread and wilted salad. But there was also cow's-milk ricotta still warm from the cheesemaker's hand, hauntingly sweet; a rough and rustic margherita pizza made with San Marzano tomatoes, fruity-sweet and coddled, and basil and homemade mozzarella; and rotisserie chicken stung with a blessedly spare and strong lemon-caper sauce. Every restaurant takes time to find itself, and I was willing to wait — although not exactly patient.

When I visited New York last month, I thought about Osteria Marco while walking back from Union Square — which was strange, because I usually dream of New York Italian restaurants when in Denver, not the other way around. In Philadelphia, sitting on my in-laws' front step smoking a cigarette, I found myself wanting very badly some of Bonanno's ciccioli (braised pulled pork, as close as the Italians get to Carolina barbecue) and a pinch of fresh, smooth mozzarella. With his dedication to craft, his obsession with ingredients, his focus and depth of knowledge, bracing temper and occasional flights of serious craziness (truffle amuse-bouche, selling black cod and foie gras at a loss, cooking on the Today show), Bonanno has risen into that realm of chefs whose allure has slipped beyond the bounds of time and place, gone interstate and trans-temporal. But he's still based in Denver, and I was just a day off the plane when I found my way to Larimer Square and the realm of King Pig.

At the garde manger station, the hostess was laying out plates and taking reservations with the phone pinned between her shoulder and ear. I'd stepped in from the frigid cold, hesitating as I always do for one stuttering step at the door because Osterio Marco always looks like it could be closed, then pulling it open and sliding into the huff of warmth and good smells and raised voices drifting up from belowground. It was the day after Christmas, and the place was busy — about three-quarters committed on the floor, with more parties coming down the stairs every couple of minutes.

I took a lonelyhearts table against the back wall — pressed up against the wine racks that Bonanno has used to separate dining areas — and looked around the room, which is pleasantly spare and comfortingly warm, with dark wood tables, a long, elegant bar, high-backed chairs, a couple of mirrors. Minimalism serves to make this enclosed space seem less so, this bunker appear more like a cozy hole-in-the-wall than a hole-in-the-ground. And on this night, the hole-in-the-wall was loud, raucous, filled with light and laughter and tables heaped with food, understaffed on the floor but limping along with the kind of good cheer that makes every success seem valiant.

I ordered wine off Bonanno's exclusively Italian list — a Corbara cabernet from Umbria that hit my nose like the scent of forty-year balsamic or the first toot of high-powered blow — and dove straight into the menu, piling up foods like a man who hadn't eaten in days, desperate for one of everything and immediately, lest I start wandering the room and eating off other people's plates. I wanted Bonanno's burrata — handcrafted, creamy as mascarpone, with a stiff bottom and a taste that's indescribable — and his Capra ricotta, sour and made from goat's milk. Then meat: coppa and the prosciutto di San Danielle because it's the best in the world. Years ago, sweating over my own glossy red rotary slicer in another basement kitchen in another city, I'd sneak slices of San Danielle — cutting them paper-thin, laying them on my tongue and waiting for the fat to melt from the heat of my body. I lived on the stuff: prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella clipped off the stiffening balls in the cooler, bottles of Mondavi merlot written off as corked and hidden downstairs in a broken locker.

"Wait," I told the waitress as she started to walk away. "That's not all."