Steps from the ferry terminal in the New York City borough of Staten Island, in a neighborhood overlooking the lower Manhattan skyline, is Enoteca Maria, a 35-seat restaurant where the chefs are grandmothers from all over the world.
The restaurant is now the subject of a new Netflix movie Nonnas, out May 9. Vince Vaughn stars as founder Jody “Joe” Scaravella, 69, who opened the restaurant in 2007 as an homage to the Italian women who made him love cooking, his grandmother Domenica and his mother Maria, for whom the restaurant is named. The movie shows how Scaravella went from being a transportation worker to opening a restaurant with senior women as chefs, played by Susan Sarandon, Talia Shire, Lorraine Bracco, and Brenda Vaccaro.
TIME went to the real Enoteca Maria to chat with the owner Scaravella over espresso. Boasting grey curly hair, small wiry eyeglasses, and a t-shirt with Gene Wilder’s face on it from Young Frankenstein that said “I’m Alive!,” he paused the interview every now and then to receive deliveries of mozzarella and branzino. Superhero figures decorate the restaurant—Batman and Spiderman dangle from the ceiling—but he makes it clear that the real superheroes in the restaurant are the grandmothers in the kitchen. A portrait of Domenica, Maria and his sister Mariana hangs prominently on a wall.
“This is not a restaurant,” he says. “It walks like a restaurant, smells like a restaurant, talks like a restaurant, but it’s not a restaurant. It’s a cultural exchange.” Enoteca Maria began as an Italian restaurant, but the menu changed over time as grandmas from all over the place were invited to share their family recipes. When TIME visited in May, the restaurant was preparing to offer Mexican, Uzbek, and Greek menus all in one weekend.
The grandmothers, says Scaravella, “are taking what their mother taught them to make, what their grandmother taught them to make, and every time these ladies are in the kitchen, you have all of this culture coming out of their fingertips.”
TIME talked to Scaravella about the origins of the restaurant, the real women who launched it, and why grandmothers make the best (and worst) restaurant chefs.
How grandmothers became chefs at Enoteca Maria
Scaravella is a Brooklyn native, and he lived on the block where he grew up for 50 years. After the deaths of his grandfather, father, mother, grandmother, and sister in quick succession, he fell into a deep depression. With the money he inherited, he looked into buying a waterfront property and headed to Staten Island, the southern-most borough of New York City that is accessible by ferry and car and has its own subway line.
He fell in love with a Dutch colonial house that was walking distance from the Staten Island Ferry terminal and decided to start a new life there. On a walk one day, he spotted a vacant storefront next to the St. George Theatre, and he decided to buy it and open a restaurant in honor of his mother Maria.
As the movie shows, he was basically working two jobs when he first started to get Enoteca Maria off of the ground, often having people cover for him at his job with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
In honor of his grandmother Domenica, a confident home cook, Scaravella wanted to hire actual grandmothers to do the cooking. Domenica, was from Sicily and died just a few months shy of 100 years old. She was feisty, and Scaravella grew up watching her cook and shop for ingredients. At the Italian market she frequented in Brooklyn, she’d take a bite of a plum, and if she didn’t like it, she’d spit it out and leave it on the ground. “Nobody ever said a word because they knew if it was on the floor, it belonged there,” Scaravella says.
Scaravella put out an ad looking for real grandmothers to cook in his restaurant. So many people responded, from all over the world, that Enoteca Maria ended up having a rotating line of chefs.
Scaravella is passionate about global cuisine and preserving recipes. Along with showcasing food from different countries, Enoteca Maria offers a free class where participants can get one-on-one cooking tutorials from grandmothers. He hopes to eventually create an online group where people can post their own family recipes.
But doing the movie and making a Facebook group might be as far as the restaurant goes, tech-wise. Those interested in going to Enoteca Maria have to make a reservation the old-fashioned way, by phone. Scaravella is not interested in getting on reservation apps like Resy or OpenTable, and definitely not interested in a grandma delivery service via UberEats or DoorDash.
“Food loses some of its value for every moment it’s in a box,” he says. “I’m not chasing a dollar. I’m chasing a dream.”
Dishing about the real women who inspired Nonnas
Nonnas follows the Italian cooks who helped launch the restaurant, and in the film, the women are fictionalized but inspired by the colorful women in Scaravella’s life.
Susan Sarandon plays Gia, a hairdresser who took care of Scaravella’s mom when she had cancer and gets recruited by Scaravella because she’s such a good baker. Talia Shire plays Teresa, a nun who left a convent after falling for another woman. Lorraine Bracco plays Roberta, a friend of Scaravella’s mother who finds cooking at Enoteca Maria to be a nice break from living in a senior home. Likewise, Brenda Vaccaro plays Antonella, a widow who finds new purpose in life at the restaurant after a young neighbor Olivia (Linda Cardellini) tips her off to Scaravella’s ad for cooks.
The three original grandmothers in the kitchen when Enoteca Maria first opened are featured in Scaravella’s cookbook Nonna’s House, which profiles different grandmothers that have cooked at the restaurant over the years.
Carmelina Pica, the fourth of 14 kids, who worked in a sewing factory and made appetizers for an Italian market on Staten Island, including stuffed pepper strips and seafood salad that made the store a destination for Staten Island families. She attended the Nonnas premiere on April 30.
Adelina Orazzo grew up in a little town on the outskirts of Naples and got engaged to be married when she was only 13 years old. The marriage later fell apart, but, like her counterpart in Nonnas she found new purpose when her niece saw Scaravella’s ad for cooks, and he gave her free reign in the kitchen.
Teresa Scalici, known for her cookies at Enoteca Maria, lived with her grandmother in Sicily in her teenage years. She raised a family on Staten Island and went to work for Scaravella at the age of 60, often carrying around a book of recipes that her own grandmother put together.
Enoteca Maria brought meaning to Scaravella and the nonnas’ lives, but in the kitchen, the knives were out from time to time. In Nonnas, Antonella and Roberta are competitive with one another, getting into a fight in the kitchen as they compete to prove that their respective native regions of Italy produce the best food. It’s true that fights have broken out in the Enoteca Maria kitchen. “I’ve seen a frying pan raised,” says Scaravella. Among the original chefs, “Adelina and Teresa did not like each other,” he says, especially “if somebody made something that was better than the other person made it.”
And training grandmothers to cook in accordance with the health code was a whole other battle. As he explains, “My grandmother would make a pot of sauce that would stay on the stove all day, and you would pick at it all day. You can’t do that, as far as the health department is concerned.” That particular sauce may not be on the menu, but a version of his grandmother’s Sunday Gravy does make an occasional appearance. In the film, the fictional Joe spends the entire film trying to recreate his grandmother’s Sunday Gravy and figure out its secret ingredient.
In the movie, sparks also fly between Joe and Olivia, the neighbor who encouraged Antonella to join Scaravella’s kitchen. Scaravella has dated women he has met through the restaurant over the years, and his current partner is one of Enoteca Maria’s rotating chefs, Yumi Komatsudaira, who makes Japanese cuisine.
One of the most dramatic scenes in the movie really did happen. Shire’s character Teresa gets down on her knees and prays that an inspection will go well so the restaurant can reopen to customers. In reality, one of his friends—not one of the original chefs—did get down and pray to the famous priest Padre Pio for customers to show up. And shortly after she did that, the restaurant started to fill up. A portrait of Padre Pio also hangs in the real restaurant.
