My meal at Osteria Marco covered a lot of bases. I started with burrata, an Italian cheese, then went on to seafood. The dish below is Frutti di Mare or Fruit of the Sea, which is a fitting name because it includes crab, shrimp, calamari, and lobster. All in one dish! It was served cold, with a binding of an aioli (kind of like mayonnaise) and chickpea paste. The red spots are a lobster-and-red-pepper oil.

Frutti de Mare at Osteria Marco

The onions and celery made this almost like a seafood-salad experience, but one that had whole calamari and little tentacles in it. Because it was cold, it reminded me a bit of ceviche, but it wasn’t nearly as acidic as that dish is. The flavor here was mostly in the chickpea binding, because it was hard to distinguish the individual flavors of each specific type of seafood. It was definitely fresh, but not remarkable to me. I didn’t feel like I was eating lobster, or crab, or calamari.

Seafood on a fork

To follow up my seafood, I had.. pizza. It’s an unusual choice to be sure, but this restaurant is famous for their gourmet pizza selection, so I dove in. I wanted to eat something truly unusual, and though I was originally thinking of the Carbonara, which is a pizza with pancetta and egg on it, I ended up with the fig and prosciutto pizza. I like figs, and it seemed vaguely healthy with some fruit on it. (Look, honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking.)

When I look at this picture, I see a normal pizza with cherry tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, and maybe sausage or mushrooms. However, those ‘tomatoes’ are actually figs, that cheese is goat cheese and fontina, the brown lumps are caramelized onions, and the shavings are prosciuttio, or pork. Regardless of the ingredients, this is my favorite photo of this set and probably my best pizza photo to date.

Fig and Prosciutto Pizza at Osteria Marco

After eating a whole puck of burrata and a similarly sized serving of the frutti di mare, I was a little too full. The sweetness of the fig was just not the right pairing for those things, either. I didn’t want sweet after the rich, clean taste of cheese, then the briny taste of seafood. I wanted earthy, savory, salty pizza. I should have gotten a sausage pie, basically. Well, I learned a lesson that day – I don’t like sweet pizza.

A slice of gourmet pizza

You may have noticed the above picture seems to have a bite taken out of the crust. I assure you that I did not eat my pizza on the wrong-end, then hastily take a picture of it. Here’s that extra piece of crust on the pie plate. I would like this picture so much more without it; if the white plate was cleaner, this would be a great photo.

See, didn't take a bite out of that slice

Chocolate Nutella Cake at Osteria Marco

I said I was too full to enjoy the pizza, and indeed, I ate about two mini slices and picked at a third. However, nothing would keep me from trying out dessert, so I plowed ahead and ordered this chocolate cake. It’s a hazelnut torte with nutella syrup on the edges and vanilla gelato. I hoped the nutella would make it interesting, or that the hazelnut, a flavor I love, would shine through, but it was your standard dense chocolate cake. The gelato was unremarkable. I left most of this dessert on the plate.

In its defense, I don’t like chocolate cake. I like cake as a general rule, so if I see cake, I’ll order it, but over and over again, I have found that chocolate cake just doesn’t do it for me. It overwhelms all other flavors, it is often dry, and its often served icing- and filling-free. I need to just accept this and stop ordering it but the rest of the menu is often no better. I always want dessert, but never what’s on the menu. Sigh.

Back to the photography, I do like the picture, but wish I had paid more attention to the edge of the table in the upper left corner. I’m pleased with this from a personal perspective, because the light was fading fast when I took this shot, and subsequent photos were blurry, so I am glad this one came through.

Rioja is one of many small, hip restaurants in Denver’s historic Larimer Square area. It’s well-reviewed, so I thought I’d eat there, and when I looked at the menu, the homemade donuts definitely sold me on brunch. It’s supposedly Mediterranean food, but I did not get that vibe from the brunch menu. It had some pasta but also some curry and other Indian influences, as well as tuna nicoise, and, well, waffles. This isn’t a bad thing – it’s simply not your typical Italian place.

I knew I’d be taking pictures so I sat outside in the direct sunlight, right around the hottest part of the day. It was somewhere between 90-100 degrees in Denver. My iPhone was soon coffee-cup hot, I was occasionally touching my water glass to my face, and you can see what happened to my butter. For the record, the bread they gave me with it — one lavender-flavored, one studded with olives — was pretty nice.

Butter in the summer in Denver

The donuts. Oh, the donuts. Freshly made donuts, made by anyone, are delicious. They’re hot, doughy, and comforting. These donuts were filled with lemon curd and mascarpone, the creamy cheese they use in tiramisu. I’m a sucker for lemon curd, and the combination here was excellent; decadent, creamy, velvety texture, cutting down the acidity of the lemon so you get a bright, but gentle taste of melt-in-your-mouth goodness.

Homemade donuts from Rioja

Did I mention the melt-in-your-mouth goodness? Because these donuts were hot from the oven, the filling was a delightful stream of yellow that I loved to mop up with the donut. The one downside was that eating these were messy. I had that powdered sugar all over my fingers and mouth. It was a fun, whimsical messy, though. It was the mess of eating something truly enjoyable.

I experimented with adding a fork to my photos to style them a little better. One can’t rely on macro shots alone, right?

Homemade donut with melty lemon filling

They also kindly provided some blueberry compote for you to add to your donut. I tried spooning some into the donut, dipping the donut into it, and then just eating it off the plate, mixed with the remnants of the lemon curd mascarpone. It’s an interesting choice because blueberries are tart like lemons are, and it balances out the pillowy decadence of the donut itself. I didn’t need the blueberries, personally, because the lemon flavor was enough for me, but I can see what they were going for. As an aside, I like this photo because it’s like it is a waterfall of blueberries, slowly spilling towards you.

Blueberry compote

Those were so delicious, I was pretty much full and finished, but I had my ‘entree’ coming out. Yes, those donuts were just ‘starters’. To get something both healthy and interesting-sounding, I selected a dungeness crab crepe, filled with asparagus, shiitake mushrooms, and crab, then topped with black truffle hollandaise sauce. Sounds fancy, but they look pretty normal, right? It’s the hollandaise – I realize it’s a cornerstone of French sauces, but it’s bright yellow. I just can’t take it seriously. I also didn’t taste the truffle flavor at all, and all in all, eating an egg-and-butter sauce after those donuts was just too much richness for me.

Asparagus, crab, and shiitake mushroom crepes

I ended up just eating the inside of the crepes, which were very light. The asparagus added some crunch to the soft crab, and the mushrooms brought some earthiness to shindig. They were generous with the amount of crab, and overall, I thought this was a good combination of flavors. I just wish I hadn’t had the donuts before it.

Asparagus, crab, and shiitake on a fork