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.
Nonnas (from left to right): May ”Dolly” Joseph, Vijayalaxmi Kulkarni, Nina Uhovskaya, Shireen Mahmud, Irene Rivera, Zoraida Benitez, Julia Ferraro, Wen Xian, Karina Sellhorn Brandao, Anahit Sadoyan, Ploumitsa Zimnis, Yumi Komatsudaira, Melanie Mandel, Hakima Elgabari.
In 2015,