Beyond that, Bonanno insists that all of the salumi products served at Osteria Marco were sourced through outside purveyors, and says he produced the invoices to prove it. Nonetheless, the inspector pressed Koelliker, who admitted that, in fact, there was a salumi room above Bones, Bonanno's Asian noodle restaurant located between Mizuna and Luca D'Italia. "As soon as Burton told them that we had a salumi room, the inspectors bolted. All of a sudden, the alleged norovirus at Osteria was no longer important," Bonanno recalls.
"This was all a ruse to find my meat-and-cheese room," he continues. "Six, maybe seven, inspectors showed up at Bones in early April, several days after the outbreak, and demanded access to my private offices. For the past five years, my company — Bonanno Concepts — has leased those offices, so technically they aren't a part of any of my restaurants." Bonanno even pointed to his lease to defend that position, but because of the office's proximity to the commercial kitchens for Luca and Bones, "it didn't matter," he adds.
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Inside the salumi locker above Bones, the inspectors found a few hundred pounds of prosciutto, pancetta, coppa, guanciale, sopressata and more. "Bones has never once served one piece of salumi, nor was anything in my locker ever served at Luca," insists Bonanno. "My salumi habit is a hobby, and I use it strictly for personal reasons — when I have dinner parties at my house or want to give it away as gifts — and it seemed easier, cleaner and more sanitary to use a commercial kitchen rather than my house." The locker was temperature-controlled at 62 degrees, with 60 percent humidity, which was "exactly what it should be," he says. Even so, Bonanno was forced to discard every last ounce of meat.
This wasn't the first time that Bonanno had faced an inquiry about his meat-curing processes. In December 2008, just a few weeks before he opened Bones, he'd received a cease-and-desist order from the City of Denver that forced him to temporarily suspend his house-cured meat operation, then located in the basement of Luca, after an inspection determined that his air-cured meats were stored at an improper temperature — 68 degrees rather than 41 degrees, the temperature required by law. Lee says Bonanno was warned that unless he had an approved Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points plan approved by the city to ensure food-safety management, his meat-curing activities would remain an illegal endeavor.
While the meat was hitting the dumpster, a female employee at Osteria Marco suffering from diarrhea had agreed to submit a stool sample, which was tested for norovirus. The CDPHE came back with its result: negative. Three days later, on April 4, Osteria was again reinspected, and two additional employees — both food handlers who "reported symptoms consistent with norovirus," according to the city's report — submitted rectal swabs. Again, those samples tested negative for norovirus.
"It's unfortunate as we are not able to have confirmation of the suspected pathogen," Vu wrote in an April 9 e-mail to a department supervisor.
In fact, Bonanno's meats were never identified as the cause of the outbreak — and nor, for that matter, was anything else that was served to the 22 Osteria Marco guests and employees who ultimately complained about being sick. And Osteria Marco was never closed during the investigation. "Measures were put in place to protect public health, which enabled the facility to continue to operate," explains Lee.
Today, the cause of the problem remains undetermined — although the department remains reluctant to give Bonanno a complete pass. "It's possible that a customer could have initially introduced the illness to the facility," concedes McDonald. "The investigation revealed that the presence of ill employees, poor hand washing by employees and bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat foods by employees played a substantive role in the spread of the illness via food or via contaminated environmental services in the facility."
Osteria Marco, he maintains, was the only restaurant where there was a "common point of exposure for all of the ill individuals."
And the symptoms, McDonald stresses, were absolutely indicative of norovirus. "There was a preponderance of evidence that led us to believe it was norovirus," he says. "We matched up symptomatology with the food that was consumed at Osteria Marco, along with the incubation period, and by looking at those parameters, we can nail down what the source is."
While Bonanno wasn't fined for the outbreak itself, he was smacked with a $500 fine for several violations documented during the March 29 investigation. He later appealed the fine, which was reduced to $350 by a hearings officer.
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The relationship between the city's health department and its restaurants was not always this sour.
"Fifteen, twenty years ago, a health inspector would walk into a restaurant, ask to talk to the person in charge, and they'd walk around the restaurant together to determine areas for improvement," recalls Pete Meersman, president and CEO of the Colorado Restaurant Association, which today includes 771 Denver restaurants in its membership. "An inspector might determine that a water glass couldn't be on the shelf because if it spilled, it had a slight potential of falling into a pot of something and making someone potentially sick, and if something like that happened, the violation would still be written up, but there would be a conversation between the manager, chef, operator, whomever, and it would be educational."
