Nonnas

The restaurant is real. Enoteca Maria opened in Staten Island in 2007, founded by Joe Scaravella and staffed by a rotating roster of actual grandmothers, each cooking her own region's dishes on her own night of the week. The film compresses that rotating-nonna concept into four fixed characters, but the premise — real grandmothers, real family recipes, no professional kitchen training required — is the restaurant's actual pitch, not a screenwriter's invention.

"Sauce" or "gravy" depends on who's asking. The film gets a beat of dialogue out of it — "Do you call it sauce or gravy?" — because the two words split along regional and generational lines in Italian-American households, not because one is more correct. Whichever word a family uses is usually the one that survived being handed down.

Capuzzelle is a real, deep-tradition dish, not an invented shock value. A whole roasted, stuffed animal head is genuinely part of the nose-to-tail cooking history of several Southern Italian regions — the film plays its introduction for a laugh, but the dish's roots are sincere: waste nothing, especially not from an animal that fed the family.