Tables are pushed together to accommodate a party. A large family of about 20 people is celebrating the birthday of a purple dressed grandmother. They’re loud and cheerful, eating and drinking in a dimly lit restaurant. A waitress brings out a sumptuous slice of chocolate cake with a candle on it. The speakers blast a happy rock song from a couple of decades ago. Everyone sings and claps and the atmosphere is of the lovely kind one remembers from family parties of childhood.
It’s a Saturday night at Enoteca Maria, also known as “il ristorante delle nonne,” “the granmothers’ restaurant.” The cozy eatery, only open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, is in Staten Island, a short walk from the ferry terminal. It’s quite an unusual place for a popular New York restaurant. Few New Yorkers like to travel all the way to the south borough, and most of the tourists who take the iconic orange ferry to Staten Island do so for the views of Manhattan from the water. They get on the boat, take some pictures, and sail right back.
Nonna Maria from Avellino (ph Facebook)
And yet the quietness of the St. George neighborhood is a refreshing break from Manhattan’s honking and screeching. From the ferry, one can see the Statue of Liberty, the glittering of skyscrapers in the distance, and, if the timing’s right, the sunset. Enoteca Maria is packed. The phone is ringing off the hook, the tables are all reserved, the staff has to turn away many potential customers. That’s probably because the Enoteca is not your usual restaurant.
At Enoteca Maria, the chefs are grandmothers from all over the world. When it opened 13 years ago, only Italian grandmothers held the kitchen. Now, it’s “nonnas from the world,” from Armenia, Trinidad, Bulgaria, Japan, Greece, just to mention a few. The lunch is still strictly Italian. The dinners are a traditional food homage to New York City’s multicultural nature. The grandmothers come and cook homely food for patrons nostalgic for family and a coziness that’s unfortunately missing from too many of the big city’s restaurants. They even offer free cooking classes.
The nonnas’ project was started more than 10 years ago by Joe Scaravella. Mr. Scaravella sports an impressive white beard and gold rimmed round glasses as he mans the counter and the ever ringing telephone.
Ravioli e Salsiccia by Nonna Maria (ph. Facebook)
“We opened this place about 13 years ago. The years prior to that I lost my grandparents, and my parents, and my sister,” he recounts over the restaurant’s chatter. “Basically the idea was to create that safe place for myself again.” Mr. Scaravella wanted to recreate the comforting space that his family had provided. So, having an Italian heritage, he put an ad in the Italian-American newspaper America Oggi and started recruiting grandmothers. He says there is a special matriarchal power in the figure of the “nonna,” the woman who holds the family together, and can do so by providing food and nourishment from the kitchen, among other things.
“Grandmothers are the vessels that carry our culture forward. That’s how we know who we are. They pass down languages, they pass down history, they pass down food culture,” he says. “That’s how you understand your heritage.”
The grandmother of the night is nonna Kathy, from Uzbekistan. She smiles over a try of handmade focaccia in the kitchen. It’s the third time she cooks at Enoteca Maria, a place she discovered casually having dinner with her son. She’s cooking traditional dishes from her home country: Pirozhki, savory buns stuffed with rice, eggs and scallions, Golubci, cabbage leaves filled with flavoured ground beef and veal and cooked in homemade sauce, and Kotleti, breaded patties served with mashed potatoes. The purple dressed grandmothers whose birthday was just celebrated comes to the kitchen and hugs her. “She’s like a daughter to me,” she explains, holding her hands affectionately before saying goodbye. The evening service is about to begin, and nonna Kathy will be busy.
It’s not uncommon for patrons to give the nonnas standing ovations at the end of the evening. “Yes, people are liking it,” says Mr. Scaravella. He just wanted to comfort himself, and he ended up comforting many others. The experience is well worth taking the orange ferry all the way to Staten Island.