If you remember getting excited about going to grandma's house for dinner, you're not alone. Some of our favorite meals growing up were created in grandma's kitchen. Well now, one restaurant is bringing your favorite flavors of your childhood to the dining table once again.
Enoteca Maria in Staten Island, New York is offering an experience like no other.
The restaurant has a rotating staff of grandmothers from all over the world that help to create a unique experience for diners. Coming from 30 different places including Czech Republic, Palestine and Algeria, you can expect the warmth of a home cooked meal while dining out at this restaurant.
The chefs use broken English to communicate, and with the help of the restaurant's staff of multilingual waiters they make it work.
Putting a restaurant of grandmothers together is not only a lucrative business, but it's a great opportunity for the chefs. In a 2015 study, research suggests that seniors who work are in better health than those who are retired.
You've heard of too many cooks in the kitchen? So how does this group of women get along?
"You can't really put too many of them together," Jody Scaravella, owner of the restaurant joked. "Especially in the kitchen. Because you're gonna see, sparks are gonna fly."
"Each one of these [Italian] grandmothers feels like they're the boss, because in their particular family unit, they're at the top of that pyramid. So when you put all of these grandmothers that are all at the top in a room together, they all feel like they're in charge and they're all wondering what that other person is doing there," he joked. "It can get dicey."
Continue to the next page to see what makes the restaurant unique and a video about the restaurant.
After losing his own grandmother, Jody Scaravella started the restaurant a decade ago. In the kitchen there is always an Italian grandmother and one from somewhere else.
"Seeing an Italian grandmother in the kitchen cooking was my idea of comfort," he said.
The restaurant started with just Italian grandmothers cooking the cuisine of Scaravella's heritage.
He got his first recruits by placing an ad in an Italian newspaper seeking "Italian housewives to cook regional dishes." Over time, the restaurant grew from word of mouth.
Now the restaurant has become much more than that.
Though some of of the nonnas are from Staten Island, many come from Brooklyn, New Jersey and The Bronx to cook at the restaurant.
While the restaurant employs mostly grandmothers, there is one grandfather, Giuseppe Freya from Calabria who makes all the pasta.
"He makes the raviolis, he makes the ricotta gnocchi, he makes tagliatelle, he makes the pasta sheets for our lasagna," Scaravella explained. "He's fantastic."
By bringing people from all sorts of backgrounds into the kitchen, the restaurant is able to celebrate diversity and carry on years of family traditions.
"Every time these ladies are in the kitchen cooking, you have hundreds of years of culture coming out of their fingertips," Scaravella said.
The restaurant books up frequently with visitors arriving to the country and wanting to try the nonnas' food.
"I regularly get phone calls from Australia, from England, and from Italy to book reservations. I'm always flattered by that," Scaravella said. "We get a lot of people who come from Manhattan, the ferry is right down the block. That's also very flattering, because there's a restaurant every twenty feet in Manhattan. Why are they coming here?"
There's no doubt that nonnas home-cooked meals are something that diners appreciate.
"Usually at the end of the day, the people will applaud the nonnas that have cooked for them," Scaravella beamed. "They get standing ovations on a regular basis and it's really something nice."
I think we just found a reason to visit Staten Island! What was your favorite dish your grandmother cooked for you growing up?
Sources: Refinery 29 / Gothamist / Dose / NPR