Osteria Marco is another restaurant in Denver’s Larimer Square. They focus on casual Italian food, which really means gourmet pizza. The owner has several other restaurants with more upscale tastes, so this one was meant to have a more convivial atmosphere to go with the high-quality food. I don’t know if they really managed that. Denver as a whole is a lot more casual than what I am used to in NYC, and everyone in Larimer was nicely dressed anyway. Yes, people were gabbing and laughing, but I think they would have done so at any other restaurant on the block.

I ordered the burrata as my appetizer. Burrata is a thin skin of mozzarella, filled with a soft mixture of mozzarella and cream. It was invented in Italy partially to get rid of leftover mozzarella. I’ve had it just once before from Whole Foods in NYC. It was freshly made but sat on my desk at work for a few hours, unrefrigerated, and when I got home and tried it, it was creamy but had an underlying bitterness. The cheese is supposed to keep for 24 hours so I wasn’t sure if that was just part of its flavor profile. Osteria Marco’s burrata is made in-house so it was guaranteed to be as fresh as can be.

I really love the wooden slats in this photo; it really changes the tone of the photograph. As you can see, they served the cheese with olive oil and toasted, rustic bread.

Burrata at Osteria Marco

The cheese was topped with pepper, which I adore, and some olive oil. Freshly ground pepper has the most intoxicating smell. I grew up smelling table pepper and, as a result, never added it to anything, but once I got a whiff of toasted peppercorns from a grinder, I was sold.

Burrata with olive oil and pepper

The char on this bread is simply gorgeous. The whole thing has such a delightfully rustic look; the flour dusted on its side, the wide-open crumb, the thick slices. This is the way to serve bread at an Italian place! I don’t even like bread that much.

Rustic bread

I mentioned above that the burrata I had a few months ago was slightly bitter. I braced myself when trying Osteria’s, but it was perfect. Creamy, delightful, clean-tasting. Not a trace of unpleasantness in it. It was much like eating a fresh ricotta or cottage cheese, but with a smoother texture. I’m a sucker for soft, creamy mouthfeels, which is why I love melted cheese, melted icecream, and frosting. This cheese put me in eyes-closed, fully-concentrating-on-this-wonderful-flavor mode, which happens rarely. The only cheese that has done that for me consistently is, curiously, the mozzarella sticks at Johnny Carino’s. (I know that’s lame because it is a chain. The combo of breading, cheese, and that perfect spicy marinara sauce is what gets me, rather than the cheese itself.) I’ve had cheese at Per Se, Thomas Keller’s restaurant, that didn’t speak to me this much.

Burrata on a fork

I love the idea of the burrata on the bread because this bread was just so beautiful, but the hard crunch of the toasted edges paired with the creaminess of the cheese didn’t work for me. I loved this cheese for its texture, and I didn’t want anything obscuring that.

Burrata on toasted bread

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