If you’re a chef, one way to get eager patrons to stop asking for recipes is to write them down for them. The other is to publish a book.
Restaurateur Frank Bonanno has gathered more than 200 recipes for everyone who has ever eaten, planned to eat or wanted to eat at his much-lauded Capitol Hill restaurant.
The result is “Mizuna,” based on the restaurant’s French-inspired contemporary American cuisine. (The book and restaurant take their collective name from an edible plant in the mustard family with glossy dark green, feathery leaves.)
If you love sweetbreads, you’ll swoon over the one for Veal Sweetbreads Saltimbocca; and if Oysters Rockefeller suits your fancy, you’ll be pleased with the variation on Page 17, Potato-Wrapped Oysters Rockefeller Style. Bakers needn’t fret over accommodating altitude if a cherry clafouti is the dessert of choice. The recipes in “Mizuna” ($34.95) were tested at
5,280 feet.
Undergirding the success of restaurant and cookbook are food values rooted in Bonanno’s Sicilian heritage and broad-based training, including stints abroad, at the Napa Valley’s French Laundry and in Denver. He is especially appreciative of the time he spent with Mel Master, owner of Mel’s, a Cherry Creek dining institution.
“I know people think it’s crazy that I put so much emphasis on fresh and organic and the best high-quality everything I can find, but I learned this from Mel. Customers can tell the difference. It’s why they want to make (a dish) at home. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written recipes on receipts, business cards, you name it.”
He won’t have to do that anymore.
It is Bonanno’s first cookbook. Other than the “Jax Fish House: Book of Fish,” by Dave Query and Jill Zeh Richter, and “The Fort Cookbook,” by Sam Arnold, “Mizuna” is the only one in recent memory written by a Denver chef.
But Mizuna is no longer a “local” restaurant. It has also attracted national attention, including Fodor’s, the American traveler’s bible, which said, in part, “Frank Bonanno knows how to transform butter and cream into comforting masterpieces at this cozy, charming eatery that sports warm colors and intimate seating.”
Evaluations from the Zagat survey placed Mizuna in the company of such nationally recognized restaurants as Bacchanalia in Atlanta; Lonesome Dove in Fort Worth, Texas; Nobu in Las Vegas; Tony’s in St. Louis; and Le Bernardin in New York.
When such accolades are brought to Bonanno’s attention, he insists neither the restaurant nor the book is about him. It’s about the food and the team he has to prepare and serve it.
“Everything in the book involved friends, friends of friends, or staff from Mizuna and Luca (d’Italia, Mizuna’s neighboring sister restaurant),” he says. “The people who wait tables remembered the most popular dishes and we put some of them in. The cooks who make the food, the busboy who keeps things moving, the team put it together.”
A significant part of that team is Jill Richter, wife of one of Bonanno’s college classmates, Richard Richter, who manages The Vineyard Wine Shop in Cherry Creek.
“Frank gave me all his menus from the opening of Mizuna to the time we started writing the book two years ago,” she says. “We put a big list together, then whittled it down to what I thought would fit into the book.
“Then Frank looked at what he thought people would make at home. He hadn’t kept a recipe book, so I pretty much started from scratch.”
That meant one day a week Richter cooked with the guys on the line, learning their processes. If she needed clarification, she would discuss how a recipe should be assembled. She did this for six months.
“If something didn’t turn out the way I thought it should, I’d go back and ask more questions,” she says. “After I turned in the recipes, we started the photography, picking dishes that would look best on the pages.”
Richter’s experience as a chef helped, and that she and restaurateur Dave Query had previously collaborated on the Jax book. She knew a designer, and Frank Bonanno knew Denver artist Quang Ho, whose works hang around the world and on several of Mizuna’s walls.
His painting “The Mizuna Line” was used for the cookbook’s cover. It captures the movement and energy of the Mizuna kitchen at crunch time.
“The first time we went to Mizuna, my wife and I were amazed by the food,” Ho says. “For me, fine food is like fine art, and Frank’s food knocked us off our feet. At the time I looked over to the kitchen area and thought it would make a great painting.”
When the book idea came along, Ho decided this was his chance to do something he had always wanted to do: a large painting. He chose the kitchen’s line as subject matter. The book’s cover is a reduced version of the 2-by-4-foot work that sold to a Vail collector for $11,000.
“The kitchen artistry at Mizuna left an imprint on me in the sense that there is a fine art to anything you do in an artful and sensitive manner,” says Ho, who characterizes his style as expressive realism. “Their cooking is like a symphony where abstract notes come together in harmony.”
Equally impressive are the photographs by Wyoming-based photographer Bill Cooley. His photograph of a blood orange and red onion salad looks as though a fork could lift the ingredients off the page.
“I have no idea how many photographs he took altogether,” says Jacqueline Bonanno, who sweated through the 24-month effort with her husband, reading, editing and proofreading. “There were days when we were here with Jill and the photographer and her kids and my kids were running around all over the place. Thank goodness we didn’t know what we were getting into, or this book might never have been.”
She’s laughing now, but there have been times when laughter was in short supply. Frank is candid about the toll the book, published in China, took on him.
“It’s just been so stressful and time-consuming,” he says. “While we were trying to pull the book together I was opening two other restaurants. Nobody could ever tell us when we’d get anything. Delivery of the finished book was bumped back because it was the Chinese New Year and boats didn’t leave during the celebration. So I haven’t been very nice to be around for a while.”
Nothing like a slow boat from China to frazzle an author’s nerves.
“There were so many details we didn’t even dream of until Michael got involved,” Bonanno says. He thought of stuff that never occurred to us,” Bonanno says. “When you self-publish you’re responsible for every little detail.”
Michael Signorella’s design studio integrated photographs, paintings, recipes and text into a cohesive unit. “He told us about things like a recognition page, an acknowledgment page and who to include. He chose the paper stock and typeface, all the things that make a book look the way it does. He even found the publisher in China that had done other cookbooks.”
Bonanno devoted a page to his late partner, front-of-house man Doug Fleischmann, who died in a car accident two years after opening Mizuna. He called Fleischmann the “unlisted ingredient in every recipe.”
Mizuna sommelier Chris Gregory paired recipes with wines. Interestingly enough, the same people who were there at the start of the book – Alex Seidel, Andrew Inman, Jean Phillipe Failyu and Tony Clement – are still on the Mizuna line.
For all its mouthwatering beauty, there are occasional misspellings, omissions and a few indexing glitches. The book will be available at the restaurant and the Tattered Cover, which is taking orders. A recent delivery of 100 is already going out the door.
One volume went to Mel Master, who was in Denver recently. “I love the format and the pictures and the text that I have seen so far,” Master says. “The recipes seem to be done in such a way as to be approachable by the everyday chef, and that is a huge accomplishment.”
Staff writer Ellen Sweets can be reached at 303-820-1284 or esweets@denverpost.com.
If you go
Mizuna, 225 E. Seventh Ave., 303-832-4778
Luca d’Italia, 711 Grant St., 303-832-6600
The Vineyard Wine Shop, 261 Fillmore St., 303-355-8324
Claggett/Rey Gallery for works by Quang Ho, 100 E. Meadow Drive, Building 10, Vail, 970-476-9350 or 800-252-4438
