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Posted on October 10, 2016 - by Enoteca - Comments are off for this post
Fox News Coverage!
See it here: http://www.fox5ny.com/news/210324638-story
NEW YORK (FOX 5 NEWS) – “Just like grandma used to make” isn’t just a clever slogan at one Staten Island restaurant. Grandmothers are using home-style recipes to keep foodies coming back for more.
Meet Nonna May Joseph. She is making hoppers along with an egg, curry king fish, and onions — a traditional dish from her native Sri Lanka.
“Nonna” is Italian for grandmother. But these nonnas and nonno are from all over the world. Most of them work at least once a month at Staten Island’s Enoteca Maria to cook dishes from their home countries. Owner Jody Scaravella implemented the idea at his restaurant about a year ago. He says one kitchen is always staffed by an Italian grandmother and a second kitchen rotates every night.
Nonno Giuseppe makes the pasta. He has been cooking for over a half a century. After the pasta course, there is the main dish: roasted chicken. It’s cooked by Nonna Adelina. To say all of this food made me hungry may be an understatement. The nonnas aim to make you feel like you’re at home no matter how far away that may be. Enoteca Maria also has nonnas from Russia, Greece, Mexico, Venezuela, and Turkey.
Posted on October 6, 2016 - by Enoteca - Comments are off for this post
Gothamist Video and Article about the Nonnas!
Article Here:Â http://gothamist.com/2016/10/06/enoteca_maria_staten_island.php
“Just like grandma used to make” is much more than a clever advertising scheme, it’s literally what’s happening at Staten Island’s Enoteca Maria, where the kitchen’s staffed not by professionally trained chefs, but by a fleet of “nonnas” from around the world. For about a decade, owner Jody Scaravella has opened his kitchens to grandmothers cooking the cuisines of their native countries. It started with just Italian grandmothers, after his own heritage, but has since expanded to include dozens of women from places like Argentina, Algeria, Syria, the Dominican Republic, Poland, Liberia, and Nigeria.
Scaravella got his first recruits by placing an ad in an Italian newspaper seeking “Italian housewives to cook regional dishes,” but over time, his roster has grown by references and word of mouth. “I talked to everybody when somebody gets in, we talk about the concept, I always ask them if you know somebody who wants to cook,” he said. “The concept has just mushroomed.” Though some nonnas are Staten Islanders, most come from Brooklyn, with some traveling from as far as New Jersey and The Bronx to cook at the restaurant.
While the nonnas are the big draw, the restaurant also employs one male “nonno,” 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.”
There’s the old adage about too many cooks, so do the nonnas get along? “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,” Scaravella joked. “It can get dicey.”
Friendly competition in the kitchen aside, the nonnas are a beloved fixture of the community, which hopefully can weather this development storm without too much upheaval. The restaurant even attracts customers from around the world—and they don’t need a fancy ferris wheel to do it.
“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?”
They’re coming for a home-cooked meal and an experience—grandma’s cooking—they might not be able to have with their own nonnas anymore. “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.”
Posted on September 26, 2016 - by Enoteca - Comments are off for this post
Brendan Coyle
Brendan Coyle
R, G, Bree
Brendan Coyle is a multimedia and multigenre artist currently based in Richmond, VA where he went to art school prior to his 12 years living in New York. He is known in Staten Island for founding a grass roots organization that has become a time-honored tradition of monthly gallery exhibitions known as Second Saturdays. The scope of Coyle’s artwork includes narrative themes that play out as a mythology pieced together by sculptures, comics and performance art. He has done multimedia installations and experiments with video projections, but also toils over highly detailed works of sculpture in traditional materials such as wax and clay and often using modern debris as a cumulative material.
The artwork you see on the walls of Enoteca Maria is of another experimental camp known as glitch art. They are prints that capture the erosion of a digital image. They are created by layering the effects of apps that sort the pixels of a given image in different ways, creating an array of chaotic remixes of the original image. The original images that these canvas prints come from are also other works of art: an oil-painted portrait of a muse, and a close-up of a small figurine that is self-portrait-as-comic-book-character. The images are new works, but also a conceptual look at the documentation of art, and of anything that people now choose to document and, through filters and design motifs, improve upon, crystallizing the memory of the original thing, and perhaps elevating it. The use of a glitch as such a filter refers to the entropy of the real thing as its copy takes on a new life. Evolution and its apocryphal linkage to human progress is a continuous theme in all of Coyle’s work, but the conceptual and moral quandaries addressed therein rarely compromise the artistic effort to create a new thing of beauty. Â
Mustard Man
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At Enoteca Maria, we welcome artists from the North Shore and other parts of Staten Island to bring their art to our table. We’re devoting a space just for you, to feature a selection of art work each month in our virtual gallery…Enoteca Galleria.
We invite you to submit a series of three to five images of your work: (photographs or images of your paintings, drawings, sculptures, metal work, or files of your graphic design.
Please email (content at enotecamaria dot com) your selections, along with your name, location, and web address (if available).
Submission guidlines: .jpg or .png, 72dpi, max width 750 pixels, max height 500 pixels.
All images remain in the copyright of the artist and are used by permission.
There is no fee for entry or compensation for use.
Artists whose images are selected for the gallery will be notified by email.
Posted on August 15, 2016 - by Enoteca - 1 comment
Mariela from Vargas, Venezuela
Posted on July 24, 2016 - by Enoteca - Comments are off for this post
May from Pannipitiya, Sri Lanka
Posted on July 5, 2016 - by Enoteca - Comments are off for this post
Nonna Marita from Cuenca, Ecuador
Hola mi nombre es Marita y soy de la hermosa ciudad de Cuenca/Ecuador. Una de las festividades que se celebran en mi ciudad y otras partes de Ecuador es el carnaval el cual se celebra los  tres dÃas consecutivos antes de el miércoles de cenizas. En estos dÃas las familias y amigos se reúnen a mojárse con bombas de agua y carioca( una espuma).Posted on May 7, 2016 - by Enoteca - Comments are off for this post
A Mother’s day exclusive from the NY POST!
http://nypost.com/2016/05/07/grandmas-from-around-the-world-cook-at-this-local-eatery/
Craving some home cooking this Mother’s Day, but want to take your mom out? Try Staten Island eatery Enoteca Maria (27 Hyatt St.; 718-447-2777), where actual grandmothers will make you dishes from their own time-tested family recipes.
When it opened in 2007, a rotating cast of a dozen Italian nonnas (Italian grandmothers) took turns manning the kitchen — “I’m a nonna magnet,†brags owner Jody Scaravella. “Grandmothers love me.â€
Since then, his roster has expanded to 30 grannies. And, last summer, he broadened his culinary horizons with Nonnas of the World, featuring home cooks from such far-flung locales as Trinidad, Prague and Kazakhstan. Each night spotlights a menu from one of the Italian grandmas, cooking regional fare, as well as one from another part of the globe. On Sunday, Nonna Rosa Correa, from Lima, Peru, will take her turn in the kitchen whipping upchupe de camarones (shrimp stew), cilantro-marinated meat and the flan-like dessert crema volteada.
“Our mission is to celebrate every culture,†says Scaravella, who hopes to add even more grandmas to Enoteca’s global lineup. Here’s a look at five Nonnas of the World.
From Syria
When Nonna Zena Mossis and her husband moved to New York City — where their son lives — from war-torn Kamishly, Syria, three years ago, she didn’t speak any English, barely knew her son Jay’s new wife and had left behind two daughters in the Middle East. “I figured we would come here and wait for things to calm down in Syria and then go back,†says the 65-year-old, who received a visa when Jay’s son Christopher was born three years ago. “But that hasn’t happened.â€
Zena had spent her last two years in Kamishly without water, electricity or security from the violence erupting around her, buut it still took her a while to get used to life in the US. So, when her daughter-in-law, Irini, found an ad on Craigslist looking for new chefs at nearby Enoteca Maria, she encouraged Zena to apply. Now, she comes to the restaurant once a month, making her family’s signature grape leaves and patties stuffed with ground meat.
“People clap each time I leave the restaurant,†Zena beams. She also says working there has boosted her self-confidence and has strengthened her relationship with Irini, who acts as her translator and helps her plan and write out her menus in English. Now, she can’t imagine going back to her hometown.
From the Czech Republic
Nonna Helena Svetla actually hates cooking. But the 63-year-old Czech grandmother does like when people praise her duck with apples or potato dumplings with sauerkraut. “That’s the best,†says the former art restorer, whose daughter, Anna, encouraged her to begin cooking at Enoteca Maria after going to dinner there with her husband. “The first time I was cooking, I was outside and somebody came to me and told me I was amazing. I love the interaction.â€
Nonna Helena Svetla Photo: Chad Rachman/NY Post
Helena moved from Prague to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, two years ago to help Anna and her husband raise their son, Jesse, now 2. “New York has been amazing, because it is helping me find myself,†she says through Anna, translating. “In Eastern Europe, I feel so tied up because of the past and how people are,†she says.
And after a career spent restoring gold-plated Renaissance statues and churches in Prague, Helena paints her own abstract art (which now hangs on the restaurant’s walls) and marvels at the architecture in the Big Apple.
From France
Nonna Monique Papon was already living in New York for 30 years before a friend recommended her for a job at Enoteca Maria, where the Staten Island resident cooks such traditional French dishes as bouillabaisse and boeuf bourguignon. “The first day was very nerve-racking because when you don’t know the technique at a restaurant, it’s like [you’re] in a panic. But now I’m OK.â€
Monique grew up in the French village of Châteauroux, but the 65-year-old says that wanderlust is in her blood: Her father was a truck driver, and her aunt was always traveling to some place exotic like the Ivory Coast or Australia. “She would always bring us back some beautiful fabric or spice that you couldn’t get anywhere else,†recalls Monique.
After she worked 10 years in a local factory, Hollywood star Yul Brynner hired Monique to take care of his two adopted daughters from Vietnam, Mia and Melody. In 1975, the family sailed for America.
“I was like, my eyes couldn’t see everything,†she says of first landing in NYC. “Everything was so gigantic.â€
She regularly sees Melody, who lives in Brooklyn and works in publishing, and keeps in touch with Mia, who visits frequently from Miami with her own two children. “I always wanted to have children, but I didn’t,†says the divorcée, who was married briefly to Brynner’s driver. “So, for me they are like my two daughters.â€
Nonna Monique Papon Photo: Chad Rachman/NY Post
From Peru
When Nonna Rosa Correa’s son Victor moved to Staten Island from Lima, Peru, 12 years ago, the now-72-year-old mom decided to go with him. “I was divorced, and though I had another daughter in Peru, I thought I would come to the US,†Roas says. “Plus, I wanted to make sure [his kids] spoke Spanish.†Rosa lives with her son, his wife and their three children. Her daughter-in-law suggested she applied for a job at Enoteca Maria. “She said, ‘Do you want to cook with the grandmothers?’ I had never worked before, and I said yes. So, I came here and we liked it.â€
She still is getting used to American customs 12 years later, and still misses her daughter. But she loves going to the beach and especially fishing: “Though I never catch anything — it’s just for fun!â€
Her favorite thing, besides playing with her grandchildren? Cooking at Enoteca Maria. “I would come here every day if [Scaravella] asked me to,†she says. “When I cook here, the people say, ‘Ay! Ay!’ They want to take photos of me. They love the food I make. It makes me feel good.â€
From Italy
Twenty years ago, Nonna Adelina Masana moved with her husband from Naples, Italy, to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, an Italian neighborhood. “It was like I never left Italy,†she says, adding that she wishes she had had more incentive to learn English (which she speaks haltingly). Although Adelina, now 60, divorced, and her ex-husband moved back to Italy, Adelina happily lives with her children and two grandchildren.
One of the original nonnas in the Enotecca Maria kitchen, she works there four or five times a week — and enjoys cooking at the restaurant specialties such as eggplant boats stuffed with rice, mozzarella, ricotta, ground beef and peas. “It gives me an excuse not to cook at home, and gives me independence.â€
