Close your eyes and conjure up the memory of gathering around the table for a family dinner when you were a child. Maybe you are at your grandparents’ house, or your aunt and uncle’s. All around you, you can hear your younger cousins shrieking with glee as they roughhouse together in a game of tag. Your older cousins are discussing the latest chart-topping single. Out in the living room, your dad and uncles groan in response to the football game playing on the television.
Amid the chaos, you are laser-focused on one of the five senses you learned about in kindergarten this week: smell. Scents that you will spend the rest of your life trying to replicate are wafting into the dining room from the kitchen. They swirl together into a medley you will forever remember as “Eau de Grandma’s Cooking,” making your stomach growl. A few minutes later, as plates are passed around, your mouth starts to water as soon as you catch a whiff of your favorite dish.
This scene is more or less the opening sequence of Netflix’s “Nonnas”(2025), based on a true story directed by Stephen Chbosky (best known for writing the 1999 bildungsroman The Perks of Being a Wallflower, as well as writing and directing its 2012 film adaptation). “Nonnas” begins with a family dinner. In a flashback, the young version of Joe Scaravella, the film’s protagonist, is sent out to the neighborhood Italian bakery to pick up ingredients for Sunday dinner. He runs through his Brooklyn neighborhood back home to the kitchen, where he helps his mother and grandmother prepare the “Sunday gravy” (red sauce) before the family sits down to eat.
After a family photo is taken, the film flashes forward to the present. Joe (Vince Vaughn) has just lost his mother. In the thick of his grief, he finds comfort in working through the recipes his mother and grandmother left behind. One day, Joe wanders over to Staten Island to an Italian farmer’s market that his mother and grandmother often took him to as a child. When he sees a rundown restaurant space for sale, he knows exactly what to do with his inheritance money. Open a restaurant named after his mother (Enoteca Maria, which is still open today) to be staffed by real Italian grandmothers—nonnas.
Although “Nonnas” is not an explicitly religious movie, the film’s motif of meals as a conduit for community and family gatherings is certainly also found in the sacramental imagination that is at the heart of Catholicism—and present throughout the Bible as well in both the Old and New Testament. The Exodus story, foundational to the identity of both the Jewish and Christian religious traditions, has within it God’s instructions for the Israelites on how to commemorate Passover (Ex. 12); God tells them to celebrate a “feast of unleavened bread” to commemorate God “passing over” the Israelites when levying the 10th plague (death of the firstborn) across Egypt.
So too in the New Testament, we find the first miracle of Jesus taking place at a wedding feast in Cana, where he turns water into wine. Elsewhere in his teaching, he uses the imagery of feasting and providing sustenance to the hungry as metaphors and parables for the Kingdom of God. And so too in the moments before his Passion, Jesus celebrated a Passover meal with his apostles at which he instituted the Eucharist in the consecration of bread and wine into his body and blood.
In “Nonnas,” the sacramental imagination behind even a simple meal is most apparent in a scene that at first glance might not seem very close to any kind of holiness at all: one where the four titular nonnas get drunk off of a bottle of limoncello. Gathered together in hairdresser-turned-pastry-chef Gia’s (Susan Sarandon) salon for makeovers before the restaurant’s grand opening, the women open up about the heartaches and tribulations of their lives. Gia reveals that she had a double mastectomy. Roberta (Lorraine Bracco) laments about her estranged relationship with her kids and her wish that she had loved them “differently.” Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro) reminisces about her late husband. Teresa (Talia Shire) shares that she left the convent because she was in love with another woman. The bonding session smooths over geographic discord between the Sicilian Roberta and Bolognese Antonella and strengthens the women’s commitment to rediscovering themselves through a culinary second act.
The behavior of the nonnas might not strike the viewer as an analogy of God’s presence in the world, but the underlying theme is there. Much like the Last Supper and other meals in the Bible, food and drink facilitate community. Gathering with others and opening ourselves up to them allows us to truly get to know the people we exist alongside. In learning more about them, we can also learn something about ourselves—our capacity for humor, empathy and resilience. Nourishing our physical selves also nourishes our emotional selves.
Just like the wedding at Cana, a miracle also happens at a meal in “Nonnas.” When a lack of customers forces Joe to close the restaurant, he decides to host one last dinner at the restaurant for all of his family and friends. Unbeknown to him, the food critic he begged to review the restaurant (and initially refused) has sent someone to see what Enoteca Maria has to offer. The result—no spoilers here—has enduring implications for all the aforementioned characters, Joe most of all.
There is nothing quite like a gathering of a tight-knit community, be that a family or a group of likeminded disciples or even just friends. The radiant love for each other is powerful enough to touch any heart, even stuffy New York City restaurant critics. As every Christian mystic from Teresa of Ávila to Pedro Arrupe could tell you, that love is central to our lives, the true secret ingredient of any Sunday gravy.
