From grandmother with love: Enoteca Maria is an unlikely social enterprise

Have you ever been to Staten Island? Maybe you caught the ferry to the sleepy New York City borough to get a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. Thousands of tourists make this trip every day, only to turn around and get on the next ferry back to Manhattan.

But a short walk up the hill from the ferry building yields a gem; an Italian restaurant with an unlikely sight in the kitchen: grandmothers.

From Thursday to Sunday, grandmothers busy themselves in the kitchen of Enoteca Maria, plying doughy gnocchi and silky calamari. The restaurant sits in the historic St George neighbourhood between a grand old theatre and a deli. Blink and you’ll miss it. Holding court behind the counter is owner Joe Scaratella. He opened Enoteca Maria 11 years ago after his mother, sister and grandmother passed away.

“After you lose your family you kind of feel orphaned, so I felt like I was really missing a piece,” he says. “It’s given me something else to think about. I think it really helped me to get through that.”

“My grandmother was the best cook and I grew up with her. After everyone passed I thought, ‘There’s probably a lot of these women out there that are really great cooks’. I think I was secretly trying to comfort myself and surround myself with these ladies, these Italian grandmothers.”

The restaurant has a rotating staff of 30 grandmothers. Several years ago, Enoteca Maria started featuring grandmothers from countries around the world. On the night we visit, an Italian and Turkish grandmother are cooking.

“There are so many cultural differences and you have to celebrate them and enjoy them because that’s who we are. It’s those differences, that’s the beauty,” he says.

Scaratella hasn’t heard of the idea anywhere else and there’s good reason: it’s incredibly hard to manage a rotating staff of grandmothers and a menu that changes every night.

“I know why it’s not being done anywhere else. It’s impossible,” he says, laughing. “To change that kitchen every day is impossible.”

The dishes that come out of the kitchen make you feel as if you’re sitting down for a meal cooked by a loved one. It’s not gourmet, but it’s delicious.

The phone rings incessantly with reservations from around the world and a film company recently picked up the rights for a movie on the restaurant.

Enoteca Maria is an incredible triumph considering Scaratella had never operated a restaurant before. He only retired from his job at the transport authority in 2015.

“It’s been a hell of a ride,” he says, calling Enoteca Maria’s success “science fiction”.

The restaurant has also turned into an unlikely social enterprise, giving older women a purpose. “Some of the really beautiful parts are a lot of these women have lost their husbands. They’re empty-nesters, they lost their husbands, they’re at home and they’re lost,” says Scaratella, recalling one woman in particular.

“When she first came here she was all dressed in black and you could see that she could barely keep from crying. A couple of days later we had an interview and I invited her to be there.

“Her children were in the front and I was talking to her children and she was in the back being interviewed. The children looked at me and they said, ‘We haven’t seen our mother this happy in a long time’. For me, that was really a special moment.”

• Enoteca Maria \ enotecamaria.com