“The USDA stamp, I got it kind of on a whim while in New York … We went to some shop on 42nd Street. I went up there, showed him the tat, and he said eighty-five bucks I think, so I got it right before my James Beard dinner.”
—Mark DeNittis
As a Massachusetts-born, first-generation Italian-American, DeNittis came by his rich food heritage through his family. With his grandparents’ influence at an early age, he gained a deep understanding and appreciation for gardening, hunting, fishing, traditional cooking, meat curing, and winemaking. Inspired by his family heritage, after high school Mark went to Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island to earn his culinary degree. In 1993, when Mark was nineteen years old, while working an externship at the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, he got his first ink: a shark on his left shoulder. The tattoo is an homage to his grade school nickname, “Mark the Shark.” Mark later got a second shark on his back, described as “a version of the Ron Jon Surf Shop shark with a chef’s hat and holding a French knife,” which he got at an all-night biker party at a campground in West Virginia.
Over the years, Mark spent time in Houston, Texas, where he worked as the chef de cuisine of the main dining room at the four-diamond Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa. A year later, he was promoted to open a $45 million project, the Houstonian and Shadow Hawk golf courses about twenty miles southwest of the hotel. But in 2000, with the birth of his daughter, he and his wife decided to try and get to Colorado to be closer to her family. He noticed Johnson & Wales University was opening a campus in Denver, so he applied to teach culinary classes. As it turned out, the dean of the campus was a former instructor of his from 1991, when he was at Johnson & Wales in Rhode Island. Mark stayed in education for nearly ten years after that.
In 2006, in addition to teaching, Mark began creating artisanal charcuterie. Not having a facility of his own that was USDA-certified, he outsourced the commercial production of his products to licensed butchers using his techniques. He first gained notoriety for his duck breast prosciutto and was later recruited to help create a peppered veal bacon for the Canyon Ranch spa and resort in Tucson, AZ. By 2009, he had reunited with former business partners to open a USDA-certified facility called Il Mondo Vecchio Salumi. There, finally making the products with his own hands, Mark had the freedom to experiment and soon added nearly forty new products to his line of cured meat products. Eventually, he needed to leave Johnson & Wales to focus on the business full-time. After a successful first two years, he started to have conflicts with the USDA over the aging process of the charcuterie. While he feels they couldn’t fully explain to him what he was doing that was against health code, they still suspended his license until he could explain his processes. After nearly six months without revenue, Mark was forced to close down operations in 2012.
Even through the tough time at Il Mondo, Mark continued to educate himself and others, and in 2011, Mark founded and taught part-time at his Rocky Mountain Institute of Meat (RMIM) in conjunction with Cook Street School of Culinary Arts. The butchery program he helped to create eventually became Colorado’s only fully accredited butchery program and led Mark to the position of Director of Culinary Education at Cook Street.
Mark says it’s comforting to see the increased use of whole animals in restaurants, regardless of whether it’s a by-product of the point-of-origin to plate movement in dining or a return to old guard notions of cooking, that include more connection to the farmers and use of whole animals in house.
The tattoos that Mark got over the years are big parts of his story, culinary and otherwise. In 2010, he commissioned a half sleeve on his right arm. It started with the map of Italy with the inscription “patria paese familia,” which he describes as signifying “for love of family, country, and native land.” Below the map are his children’s initials. On the same sleeve are images of Saint Mark (his namesake and the patron saint of law and order) and Saint Matthew (the patron saint of banking and money). Eventually he wants to add Saint Michael (the archangel who defeated Satan). He clarifies that he’s not overly religious but that these things have gotten him through challenging periods in his life.
Mark’s most culinary-related tattoo is also his simplest, a USDA inspection stamp on his left shoulder. He got it in New York in 2011 on the eve of preparing dinner at the James Beard House. The number on the tattoo was the plant number of Il Mondo Vecchio, the butchery he opened in 2009.
Mark continues to be an advocate and educator when it comes to butchery. While he will probably always have projects in the works, the latest he is focused on is a book called Pinkerton the Pigsmith. Part fictional storytelling about the travels of a humble butcher and part cookbook, it is a book geared toward helping parents and children connect to food and its regionalism through the main character’s adventures.
Mark says, “The recipe is a representation of simple food of a simple life and simple pleasures. My tattoos are a daily reminder of that to me.”
NOTES FROM THE CHEF
If your hog is not scalded and scraped, blowtorch or shave any minute hairs from the face skin’s outer layer. Remove the face from the skull. Trim and clean the ears really well; split in half. Clean the tongue of any membranes, split in half lengthwise, and set all aside under refrigeration.
The Porchetta di Testa can be used in a variety of applications. Furthermore, it can be portioned into smaller sizes and put into sealable bags or wrapped tightly. The Porchetta can be served chilled or warmed through; sliced thin like a cold cut and eaten as a salad or sandwich; or served with arugula, vine-ripened tomatoes, extra-virgin olive oil, and lemon juice, with your desired amount of fresh cracked black pepper and sea salt or kosher salt.