“Nonnas”: The New Netflix Film About a Restaurant Where the Chefs Are Four Italian Grandmothers

There are hundreds of films and series based on the world of food and wine, just think of The Bear, the horror comedy The Menu or the more romantic Julia&Julia. Now the list is ready to welcome a new member: "Nonnas",  a Netflix original film available on the platform from May 9. Directed by Stephen Chbosky, Nonnas is inspired by the true story of Joe Scaravella – Vince Vaughn in the film – and his Enoteca Maria, where four Italian grandmothers, played by Brenda Vaccaro, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire and Susan Sarandon, cook.

The True Story of Enoteca Maria

The film focuses on a theme that is very dear to us all, that is, cooking as an act of love: and it is precisely on this idea that the birth of Enoteca Maria is based. After the death of his grandmother and mother, Jody “Joe” Scaravella, an Italian-American of Emilian origins, decides to open his own restaurant where grandmothers from all over the world cook, offering a typical dish from their homeland every evening. The idea therefore is to remember the women in his life through the smells and flavors that accompanied him throughout his childhood.

The film focuses in particular on Italian cuisine: the four co-starring actresses in fact represent grandmothers coming only from Italy. In reality, at Enoteca Maria, located in Staten Island, a borough of New York City, the kitchen queens come from all over the world with the idea of ​​keeping alive not only the Italian tradition, but the history and gastronomic culture of the entire globe.

Chbosky and his cast have managed to bring to the screen, through jokes and laughter, a feeling that belongs to all of us: the love of a grandmother for her grandchildren, which, in the film and in real life, is reflected in the dishes served at Joe's Enoteca. A film that, beyond the figure of Joe, sees at its center four women who are not in competition with each other, but in which the only genuine contrasts concern which is the best regional Italian cuisine, as also stated by Susan Sarandon to the New York Times: "It's that everything comes from passion, not hostility. That's why you love them so much, because you see that in reality they are fighting about their Italian origins, and about the fact that the food is the best possible".