Where It All Began
Steps from the Staten Island Ferry terminal, overlooking the lower Manhattan skyline, a 35-seat restaurant quietly changed the way the world thinks about food, memory, and belonging.
In 2007, Joe Scaravella — who had recently lost his mother, his sister, and his grandmother — opened an unlikely restaurant on New York’s Staten Island: Enoteca Maria, where dishes were prepared by Italian grandmothers cooking treasured regional recipes. The name was an act of love: Enoteca for the wine and warmth of the table, Maria for the mother he never stopped missing.
What had started as grief became vision.
A Restaurant Unlike Any Other
Becoming a global force for Joe’s idea was simple and radical at once: no professional chefs, no culinary school pedigrees — just grandmothers, and the irreplaceable knowledge they carry in their hands. While it initially had exclusively Italian grandmothers, Enoteca Maria began welcoming nonnas from international backgrounds in 2015. Over the years, the kitchen has welcomed grandmothers from over 50 regions: Bangladesh, Czech Republic, Algeria, Trinidad, Syria, Argentina, China, Türkiye, Dominican Republic, Japan, Belarus, Poland, France, and beyond. Each Nonna brings her own menu, her own stories, her own spices — and the dining room fills with something that feels less like a restaurant and more like someone’s home on a Sunday.intergenerational and intercultural connection, with real, lasting impact across communities, sectors, and continents.
The Nonnas captivated the media not only in New York but nationally and internationally, appearing on the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Fox & Friends, and CNN’s Eatocracy, among many others. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and hundreds of outlets across the globe (Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Der Spiegel, SZ, Le Monde, El País, etc) covered what was happening in that small room in St. George. People took the ferry just to get a table. Today, we receive reservations from literally every corner of the world.
The World Took Notice
In May 2025, the story of Enoteca Maria reached a global audience of millions. The Netflix film Nonnas, directed by Stephen Chbosky and starring Vince Vaughn as Joe alongside Susan Sarandon, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire, and Brenda Vaccaro, topped Netflix’s English-language film charts for its first two weekends, collecting 15.3 million views in its initial three days and 33.3 million views in its first ten days. The film appeared in the Top 10 in 71 countries, including the United States and Canada.
Audiences around the world recognized something in Joe’s story — because it wasn’t really about a restaurant. It was about what we lose, what we choose to preserve, and who we turn to when we need to feel at home.
From a Restaurant to a Movement
Joe Scaravella is 70 years old. And like any visionary who has built something that matters, he began asking a deeper question: What happens to this when I’m gone?
The answer is Nonnas of the World Community (NOTWC) — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit built to carry the mission of Enoteca Maria forward, and to grow it into something larger than any single restaurant could ever be.
NOTWC celebrates grandmothers as the world’s most impactful and undervalued educators — keepers of culinary heritage, nutritional wisdom, and intergenerational knowledge that no algorithm can replicate and no cookbook can fully capture. Our mission is to put that knowledge back at the center of community life, where it belongs.
To learn how we’re doing that, see Our Impact
Join Us
Joe built something remarkable in a 35-seat room on Staten Island. We are building what comes next — a community, a curriculum, and a commitment to the women who have always known that feeding people is one of the most profound things a human being can do.
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