In late 2007, Frank Bonanno, one of Denver's most successful restaurateurs, opened Osteria Marco, an Italian restaurant in the heart of Larimer Square. Above the sidewalk entrance squats a brass pig; just beyond the heavy doors is the garde manger station, which offers a peek into Osteria's culinary landscape — a panorama that includes artisanal meats and handcrafted cheeses, plates of antipasti and Sunday pig roasts. Just about every night commands a full house, with guests — tourists and locals alike — streaming through the entryway and down the sweeping staircase to eat, drink and mingle.
Frank Bonanno
Pete Meersman
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On Wednesday, March 28, 2012, the first complaint came in. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment received a call from a diner who had recently eaten at Osteria Marco and claimed to have fallen ill because of that meal. The CDPHE reported the call to the Denver Department of Environment and Health, the city agency that ensures Denver food-service establishments are in compliance with state and federal laws, as well as all city regulations.
The DEH sent investigator Thuy Vu and a rep of Denver Public Health to Osteria Marco; she initially noted that an "unknown pathogen" was the suspected culprit. But she would soon report that "based on interviews conducted by DPH, [the] suspected pathogen is norovirus or noro-like virus." According to the Centers for Disease Control, noroviruses are the most common cause of gastroenteritis in the United States, marked by such symptoms as vomiting, chills, diarrhea, cramps and fever. The CDC estimates that each year, twenty million cases of "acute gastroenteritis are caused by noroviruses"; that translates to roughly one in every fifteen Americans. The CDC also estimates that the norovirus is responsible for more than 70,000 hospitalizations and 800 deaths each year in the United States.
Bonanno was out of town when the trouble started. "It was spring break, and I was in Keystone with my family," recalls Bonanno, who received a phone call from Emily Schwartz, one of his operation directors. "Emily said something about the Department of Environmental Health raiding Osteria, and I told her to call my attorney and tell her to get her ass over there." Denver health officials were "demanding all of our OpenTable guest information, including phone numbers," he says, and also requesting anal swabs from several Osteria employees. "DPH conducted interviews of two ill employees, both of whom refused the request from DEH and DPH to submit specimen samples from rectal swabs and bulk stool samples," Vu noted.
In that same March 29 report, Vu detailed other critical violations she'd observed at Osteria Marco, including "bare hand contact on ready-to-eat foods, hands not washed as required, hand sinks used to dump customer water, use of unpasteurized raw shell eggs in cocktails, improper cold holding temperatures of potentially hazardous foods, and evidence of pests (fruit flies/phorid flies)." Moreover, she noted, the "general manager also reported that nine employees (kitchen and waitstaff) called in sick within five days," in addition to "another large party" that "called the facility directly to complain about a separate, unrelated incident of foodborne illness."
A follow-up inspection of Osteria Marco on March 30 resulted in a cease-and-desist order for bare-hand contact on ready-to-eat foods, as well as a request for the name of every other Bonanno employee who worked not just at Osteria Marco, but Mizuna, Bones, Luca d'Italia, Lou's Food Bar, Russell's Smokehouse and Green Russell. "During the course of the March 29 visit to Osteria Marco to investigate the illness complaint, the investigator learned that there were a number of employees who worked at Osteria Marco and other Bonanno Concepts facilities who had recently been ill," explains Danica Lee, food program manager at DEH and an official with whom the outspoken Bonanno already had a rocky relationship. ("Yes, Danica, I'm mean" was the start of one of Bonanno's blog posts in May.)
Bob McDonald, the city's director of public-health inspections and a twenty-year veteran of the DEH, says his inspectors had every reason to look into Bonanno's other establishments. "When Osteria's outbreak came to my attention," he adds, "I instructed inspectors to check out Frank's other restaurants. With chains like that, it's common that there are cross-employees."
That wasn't all inspectors were instructed to watch for. Lee says her investigator was also told that cured meats were "being illegally manufactured at Luca and then sent to Osteria" — and possibly some of the other Bonanno Concepts restaurants. That led to concern that cured meats "may have been linked in some way to the illness," she explains. "The investigation would have proceeded the same way with any other restaurant group under these circumstances."
But Bonanno insisted then, and still insists today, that the department was on a witch hunt.
Make that meat hunt.
McDonald admits that he "suspected that Frank had a hidden meat-curing room" all along. It was difficult to "confirm it until the outbreak investigation, but we asked one of the staff members at Bones where Osteria's meat products came from, and one of the chefs opened the door for us to look."
Burton Koelliker, executive chef at Osteria Marco, was the employee quizzed about Bonanno's meat-curing program. "They asked Burton where all of the salumi at Osteria came from, suggesting that the meat could have been the culprit for the illnesses, but the fact of the matter is that salumi in and of itself doesn't contain norovirus. Botulism, yes, but not norovirus, which is an airborne illness," says Bonanno.
