Osteria Marco

The Restaurant

Osteria Marco sits one flight below street level on Larimer Square, in a brick-vaulted basement room that was originally the cellar of an 1870s commercial block. The space reads as a working Italian osteria: dim warm lighting, a long open kitchen along the back wall with a wood-fired oven and a marble pizza counter, a curing room visible through a glass partition where the restaurant's own salumi hangs, and a low bar where regulars sit for an early dinner before a Rockies game. Sixty covers across the main vault and a small private alcove for groups of eight to twelve. Chef-owner Frank Bonanno, the 2016 James Beard Best Restaurateur semifinalist who also owns Mizuna, Luca, Bones, Bonanno Brothers Pizzeria, and a small Denver beverage empire, opened Marco as a playful younger sibling to Luca, the more formal Italian room on East 7th.

The cooking centres on three pillars: the mozzarella, the salumi, and the pizza. The mozzarella is pulled by hand every afternoon from fresh imported curd and served warm in a bowl with sea salt, fruity olive oil, and grilled house focaccia, the dish a returning Denver regular orders the moment they sit down. The salumi board runs to twelve options on a busy night: house-cured prosciutto, sopressata, finocchiona, coppa, lardo, mortadella, all dry-aged in the visible curing room. The pizza programme is Roman-style, thinner crust, longer cold-fermented dough, blistered char from the wood oven, and runs through eight or nine rotating pies (a margherita, a sopressata-and-Calabrian-chile, a mushroom-and-truffle, a four-cheese, a fennel sausage). Pasta is handmade and excellent: a tagliatelle with bolognese, a cacio e pepe, a pappardelle with short-rib ragù.

The wine list runs one hundred-plus Italian references with quiet strength in Tuscany and a smart by-the-glass programme. The cocktail bar is competent rather than ambitious, Negroni, Aperol Spritz, Old Fashioneds, which fits the room. Service is warm and intelligent in the way Bonanno's whole portfolio is run: captains who can name every salumi by region, runners who don't interrupt, a manager who knows the Larimer Square local clientele by face. Marco has run a steady, full-room dinner service for nearly twenty years without losing its grip, and remains the answer for a casual-but-serious Denver Italian dinner when Luca and Tavernetta are too formal and the corporate-Italian rooms feel rote.