Nonnas (from left to right): Nancy B. Hoffman, Carmen Bernardo, Fatma Polat, Kathy Viktorenko, Ana Nicolaza Calderon, Maral Tseylikman, Pauline Findlay, Maria Gialanella, Helana Zaki, Sahar Sheasha, Fardaus Begum, Carmelina Pica.
The best cooking, as anyone who’s been to a truly remarkable restaurant can tell you, is personal. These are dishes to which the chef has a real connection, recipes with deep roots. It’s that magic—of food made from beloved recipes committed to memory long ago—that’s at the center of Staten Island’s Enoteca Maria, simultaneously a hole-in-the-wall and one of the most widely publicized restaurants in recent years. The restaurant’s notoriety comes from its ingeniously simple premise: No one cooks like Grandma, and here, she’ll cook your entire meal.
Well, not your grandmother, but someone’s grandmother. Each night at Enoteca Maria a different grandmother—a nonna, as owner Jody Scaravella has dubbed them—takes the reins in the kitchen. She cooks dishes from her home country, just as she would for her own family, alongside the restaurant’s fixed menu of familiar Italian fare. Perhaps you’ll try Erika’s Argentine charquicán tonight, and come back for Fatma’s Turkish lahmacun tomorrow.
The seed of what would become Enoteca Maria was planted after Scaravella lost his parents and grandparents. Adrift and craving the warmth he remembered from his nonna’s kitchen, he set his sights on an empty space next to Staten Island’s St. George theater, determined to open it as an Italian restaurant.
He ran an ad in America Oggi, a local Italian-language newspaper, hoping to hear from “casalinghe” (Italian for housewives) who would cook regional dishes. “I invited them to my home,” Scaravella remembers. “All these ladies showed up at my house with their husbands and their children and their grandchildren and their neighbors and their cousins. I had a house full of people following me around with plates of food.” He hired every grandma who showed up.
Enoteca Maria, an homage to Scaravella’s late grandmother, opened in 2007 with a handful of older women cooking the dishes they’d learned to make in childhood. “I wanted to fill the kitchen with Italian ladies puttering around and expressing themselves in a culinary way,” Scaravella says. “It was comforting for me.” But the restaurant wasn’t an immediate success.
On opening day six nonnas stood ready for a rush in the basement kitchen, but the restaurant stayed empty. When one nonna ventured upstairs and saw no customers, Scaravella says, “she got on her hands and knees and she started praying to Padre Pio.” Wouldn’t you know it, 15 minutes later the restaurant was full. A portrait of Padre Pio still hangs in the restaurant today. “He’s our guy,” Scaravella says.
In 2015, Enoteca Maria’s cuisine expanded beyond Italy as Scaravella welcomed grandmothers of all nationalities into the kitchen. The menu began to change nightly. One night Greek, the next Sri Lankan, according to the heritage of the nonna cooking that night. The rest is history: The reservations book now stays unfailingly filled; Scaravella released a successful cookbook in 2015 titled Nonna’s House; and this year Nonnas, a film inspired by the restaurant’s story starring Vince Vaughn and Susan Sarandon, premiered on Netflix to more than 15 million viewers in its first week.
Throughout it all, the women who cook behind the restaurant’s five-burner stove have remained the stars of the show. It’s an honor, many told me, to be able to share their food, their heritage, and the cuisine of their native country. “It’s incredible to feed people and to see the joy in food,” says Melanie Mandel, who cooks Ashkenazi food, her voice trembling with emotion. “It’s a satisfaction from within, and it’s just what I was taught to do.”
Nancy Hoffman, who claims the title of oldest nonna at 94, said cooking at Enoteca Maria feels distinctly special, as she started cooking professionally more than 30 years ago. “It’s the climax of my cooking career.”
For some nonnas, sharing their food is second nature. “I love to cook and when people enjoy my food. When you come here, you feel like you’re with family,” says Kathy Viktorenko, from Uzbekistan. “As if you’re in your own kitchen cooking for someone.”
Each of these women represents a link in a living chain of shared culinary knowledge spanning generations. “A lot of ladies out there possess a lot of old-world knowledge,” Scaravella says. “They carry tradition forward.” Many of Enoteca Maria’s nonnas said they learned to cook from their own mothers and grandmothers, and that they now were teaching their grandchildren those same recipes. In typical grandma fashion, many of the nonnas do not cook with set measurements or written recipes, relying instead on taste, smell, and memory. “Everything is here,” Wen Xian, who hails from Shanghai, says, pointing to her head.
A night at Enoteca Maria isn’t without its challenges. There’s the unfamiliar induction cooktop for one, and the fast-paced service in the 35-seat restaurant for another. But the nonnas barely bat an eye. “Ten, fifteen, twenty—I’m used to that,” Mandel says. “I start by thinking about what they’ll take home.”
Others, like Zoraida Benitez, agree. “I’m a chef,” she says. “I graduated from the New York Restaurant School.” For some restaurants, a menu oscillating between a number of international cuisines would mean constant chaos—perpetually changing ingredient orders and costs and a constant stream of new talent in the kitchen would be too much to bear. But the team is fearless, whether wrangling dozens of nonnas or stocking the small but mighty restaurant with everything it needs. Their tireless work results in the easy comfort of a kitchen you’ve known all your life—even if it’s someone else’s grandmother cooking. “We speak the same language,” Xian says. ”We love food.”
Food Styling by Inés Anguiano, Prop Styling by Maggie DiMarco
