Italian Restaurant Owner Mistakenly Appears on List of Users of Blacklisted Crude Oil

Image: Dolce Gusto

As all cooks know, oil and water don’t mix. Neither do oil and politics, at least when the oil is the cold-pressed extra virgin.

Just ask Alessandro Bazzoni, owner of Dolce Gusto, a restaurant and pizzeria in Venice, Italy. On Jan. 19, Sig. Bazzoni was slapped with sanctions by the former Trump Treasury Department for using blacklisted Venezuelan crude oil.

Crude oil on pizza? Mama mia!

“It was a mistake,” Bazzoni told Reuters by telephone on Thursday. A day earlier, Treasury had realized the error of its way and removed sanctions on Dolce Gusto.

“At the end of the Trump administration they were doing a lot really, really fast with respect to Venezuela, Iran and China,” said Tim O’Toole, a sanctions specialist at law firm Miller & Chevalier.

Bazzoni harbors no hard feelings toward the U.S. “They resolved the problem,” Bazzoni is quoted as saying. “I shouldn’t be involved anymore. It was a mistake … thankfully it was all resolved in a couple of months.”