New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
No shortcuts at Nonna Gina’s
Branford market and gelato shop follows namesake’s tradition of fresh ingredients, full of flavor, prepared with love
BRANFORD — You didn’t take shortcuts in Anastasia “Gina” DiNatale’s kitchen, whether it was peeling the garlic or making tomato sauce from scratch.
When she went food shopping, “she never went with a shopping list,” said her daughter, Giuliana Maravalle, who does much of the cooking in her daughter’s and sonin-law’s new restaurant, Nonna Gina’s Prepared Foods and Gelateria.
“She felt you go there and, if the string beans look good this week we’ll make something with string beans,” she said. “And if it’s the spinach we’ll make something with spinach. … That was always her method of cooking. Now in retrospect I do the same thing.”
It’s that attention to freshness, what vegetables are in season and the little secrets like dicing the car
rots in differently sized pieces to create a variety of textures, that Carla Maravalle — Giuliana's daughter — and her husband, Rob Criscuolo, have brought to Nonna Gina's at 750 E. Main St., with plenty of help from mom.
“She cooked to create flavors. That was her thing,” said Giuliana Maravalle. The other must: “You've got to take time to cook. You can't rush,” she said. You would never find a microwave in DiNatale's kitchen — or Maravalle's.
Everything at Nonna Gina's is homemade, except the pasta. That may be Phase 2, said Carla Maravalle. “There's only so much we can do at once … but we do buy an imported Italian brand.”
So there's no pre-peeled garlic, no pre-squeezed lemons, only a few “more Americanized” recipes,” Giuliana Maravalle said.
“I would have to say about 80 percent of what's in here is my mom's recipe,” she said. “So, of course, she's gone. But before she passed, she gave each one of us girls, there were four of us, a book, with recipes. … I don't know if it'll ever be as good as hers, but we do the best we can.”
That's because the recipes don't necessarily have amounts included, or the little secrets Nonna Gina used to make her food stand out. She learned them in her village of San Vito on a mountaintop in the Marche region of Italy, before she immigrated in 1958 to Wallingford.
Maravalle's favorite dish is pane cotto, baked bread “with a ton of different vegetables,” she said.
“It's very full of flavor,” Debbie Cairo, who works at the gelato plant, said of Nonna Gina's cuisine. “Like her chicken piccata. I was eating it and the flavors were great, but there were little pieces of lemon in there, when you bit it there was an explosion of flavors.”
The family never expected the success of the store to happen so quickly after opening Sept. 26,
2021, which would have been Nonna Gina's 98th birthday. DiNitale died in April 2020 of COVID-19. She still had been healthy and active, cooking and gardening.
“We've done zero advertising, purposely, no advertising, because we really wanted to grow organically,” Carla Maravalle said. “This was a much bigger operation than I intended to take on. So that being said, we needed to make sure that every dish that came out reflected our commitment to the level of quality that we're trying to bring here. And if we had been inundated right off the bat, we may not have been able to deliver that.”
While other businesses have struggled during the pandemic, “it's been busy every single day,” Maravalle said. “We have not had one day when it has not been busy.”
Criscuolo said his wife's goal was “to bring what her grandmother and her mother make for us to everybody. We don't cut corners. … Everything's fresh. If you look at our doors, everything's small batch. We don't cook a lot of anything.”
“Originally the idea here was to have small prepared foods in a gelateria,” selling her mother's gelato to the public, Carla Maravalle said. “But we found the space and we fell in love with the space so it's a much bigger operation than we had anticipated originally.”
Giuliana Maravalle's career started as a hairdresser, but when her partner retired, she needed to find something to do. So she opened Caffe Bottega at Chapel and Temple streets in New Haven, offering espresso and gelato. She went to Italy to train and brought a gelatiere over to train her staff. He ended up staying 40 years.
The gelato got so popular that when a customer said she should make it wholesale, she opened a plant on Long Wharf. That was 16 years ago.
There are non-dairy fruit flavors and others, like Tahitian vanilla, crème brulee, Amarena cherry (a small, bitter Italian cherry) and, Carla Maravalle's pride, La Giuliana, named for Carla Maravalle's own daughter, also named Giuliana, who helps behind the counter. It's made with triple espresso, mascarpone cheese and chocolate.
Criscuolo, a retired New Haven police officer, said he never thought he'd be running an Italian market and gelato shop. “It's a lot of work; I'm learning a lot,” he said. “I like it. I like interaction with people.”
Over the past eight months, the shop has built up a steady customer base. “It's fun,” Criscuolo said. “Our clientele has become regulars the last eight months, seeing people, so we get to know him a little bit. They know who we are. They know our stories. We're getting to know their stories.”
“I'm super grateful that we've been able to build a pretty strong customer base so far, so quickly,” Carla Maravalle said. “I'm really grateful for that. I've watched my mom open businesses. I've opened businesses before, and it wasn't always steady in the beginning. Usually you have days where nobody comes in the beginning, right? And we haven't had that yet. So yeah, I feel very lucky that we've been so well received.”