Friends since 2006, chef Chris Bianco and his doctor Frank Agnone chat about finding the perfect doctor-patient relationship.
By Jimmy Magahern | Photography by Steve Craft
It’s hard to think of any one person’s health issue that more Phoenicians have felt personally invested in curing than Chris Bianco’s allergy to pizza flour.
Forced by doctor’s orders to step away from his wood-fired oven in 2010 due to his contracting the darkly medieval-sounding “baker’s lung” (essentially an allergy to airborne flour), the Valley’s most awarded pizza chef (pictured, left) pivoted winningly, launching the pizza-less Tratto and delegating his brother Marco and others to work the dusty dough at his renowned Pizzeria Bianco. He now manages six restaurants, including his latest in Los Angeles.
Still, Bianco fans have long felt Arizona’s passionate pizza guru was dealt the cruelest of hands by the diagnosis. So, when PHOENIX heard that the same doctor who ordered him out of the kitchen, local internal medicine specialist Dr. Frank Agnone (a 17-time Top Doctors honoree, pictured right), had helped Bianco manage his asthma enough to get him back into it, we were elated – and not just for the charismatic chef.
Turns out, the story’s not as simple as that, nor quite as miraculous. Friends since 2006, when Agnone and his wife, gastroenterologist Brenda Dennert, had one of their first dates at Pizzeria Bianco, the two insist the story’s simply about finding the perfect doctor-patient relationship.
Dr. Agnone, you’re kind of a hero to Phoenix foodies now for getting this man back in front of the pizza oven. You’re like the guy that got Billy Joel back to writing songs!
Agnone: Well, he’s not throwing dough anymore. He can sustain a minimal exposure to it, but he can’t be immersed in it like before. But he’s starting to be like a regular Joe. Like, he can have some quality of life again and not have to occupy so much headspace worrying about being sick.
Bianco: I still can’t do what I used to do. I mean, I was working in a pigpen of flour all the time, 18 hours a day.
Agnone: But now he can have a little bit of an encounter with it and it’s not gonna send him into a flare-up.
So, Chris, what was this doctor able to do that the others weren’t?
Bianco: It’s not like someone finally found the antidote. I’ve had asthma since I was 5, but I always ignored dealing with it ’cause I saw it as a weakness. I had to make changes, and I needed somebody that could speak to me in a way that was relatable. We had a lot of similarities – we both had an Italian-American upbringing, so that helped. I need somebody that can call bullshit on my life.
What were some of the changes you had to make?
Agnone: I did do a multimodal and multidisciplinary program on him: allergy medicine, anti-inflammatories and bronchodilators for his airways. But his personality didn’t always make him someone that could be reined in to do all the right stuff.
Bianco: Some of it was just the lifestyle of a chef. You know, we would feed people beautiful meals, but then we might be eating at midnight standing up in the kitchen after a long night and falling asleep on the couch. And a lot of my problem was nocturnal asthma. So, he’d tell me, “You need to get to bed earlier.” I also have more reasons to take better care of myself now. I’m 61, I just had my 11th wedding anniversary. My wife’s amazing, and my kids are occasionally amazing [laughs].
Agnone: It’s not that medicine is so complex or so mysterious. It’s just challenging to implement treatment into the idiosyncrasies of a person’s life. Because you gotta get past a lot of stuff. Early on, I got to go to Calcutta and work with Mother Teresa; she was the one who said to me, “Learn to get past people’s unloveliness.” So, you have to be tenacious and driven, and you have to be hungry to help them.
Did it help that the whole Valley was literally hungry to see Chris helped?
Agnone: As providers, we seek transformation no matter who the patient is, because we get off on that! That’s edifying, it’s what keeps us from burning out. We’re always looking for the next transformation buzz.
Bianco: You gotta believe that you’re in the right place with the right doctor who’s giving you the best chance for a better quality of life. When you have those things and then you see results, then it’s like a steamroller. There’s no stopping it.
Dr. Frank Agnone practices at Village Medical in Phoenix. Find his Top Doctors listing and those of his fellow honorees in the internal medicine field on page 186 of the March/April 2024 issue of PHOENIX.
