There’s a restaurant on Staten Island with a team of cooks unlike any other. They aren’t trained chefs. Instead, they are grandmothers. A restaurant kitchen staffed by grandmas was the vision of Jody Scaravella, who opened Enoteca Maria in 2007. At first, he hired exclusively Italian nonnas, filling a personal void left by his own late grandmother.
Over time, he began to invite additional grandmothers from around the world to take turns cooking the foods they grew up with. Today, countries from Japan to Algeria are represented in the kitchen on a rotating schedule. “You have two grandmothers every day,” Scaravella explained. “You always have an Italian nonna, and every day, the featured kitchen changes.”
