Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Nonnas’ on Netflix, a gentle dramedy starring Vince Vaughn as a restarauteur who hires Italian grandmas as chefs (2025)

The casting of Vince Vaughn and Susan Sarandon in Nonnas (now streaming on Netflix) gave me hope: If two movie stars from opposite sides of the political fence can set aside their differences for the sake of a syrupy feelgood dramedy, there might be hope for America after all! Is that a stretch? Maybe, but you need to soak up any meager ray of light that passes through your grimy window. Anyway, they anchor this BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie about real-life Staten Island restaurant Enoteca Maria, which employs real Italian grandmothers – or “nonnas,” pronounced NO-nuhs – as chefs. Vaughn leads, playing the owner of the restaurant, with Sarandon alongside Talia Shire, Lorraine Bracco and Brenda Vaccaro as the nonnas, which is quite the assemblage of veteran talent. Now let’s see what the film does with it.

NONNAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: WARNING: This movie contains hard lasagna porn, which is saucy in a way regular porn is not. It exists in a halcyon warm-nostalgia flashback to 40 years ago, when little Joe Scaravella (Theodore Helm) used to love love love his mom and nonna’s classic Italian dishes, especially their “Sunday gravy,” Brooklynese for tomato sauce. Cut to the present day, where adult Joe (Vaughn) sits on his couch with a plate of food and an empty expression. He’s at his mother’s wake. Visitors bring him dishes to warm up later, and they’re delicious, but no match for the Sunday gravy, which he tries to cook himself, albeit without the proper recipe. It’s not quite the same. Is the missing ingredient LOVE? Perhaps, perhaps not, but let’s set that cliche aside for now, because we have other cliches to work through first.

Joe’s in the grief dumps, but life goes on. He now lives alone in the house he shared with his mom well into his 50s – major mama’s boy shit going on here. He slogs to his job at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority under a real dingdong of a boss. His forever bestie Bruno (Joe Manganiello) and his wife Stella (Drea de Matteo) drop by for dinner and encourage him to take some of the life insurance money and do a little something nice for himself. Joe drops by the retirement home to visit his mom’s forever bestie Roberta (Bracco), a firecracker of a woman who berates the cafeteria chef for using sauce out of a jar; she hands Joe an envelope from his mother, who asked that he get it after she died. What could be in it? He sets it aside for the perfect time to read his mother’s last words to him. When’s that, you might ask? When the movie really needs him to open it, of course.

Joe hops the ferry to Staten Island to visit the outdoor produce market where his mom and nonna used to buy fresh tomatoes, and runs into Love Intere- er, I mean, Olivia (Linda Cardellini), and her elder neighbor Antonella (Vaccaro). Antonella is there to squeeze the tomatoes, and we soon learn that Joe failed to do the same to Olivia a thousand million hundred years ago after he took her to prom and abandoned her to go drink with his buddies. While on the island, Joe spots an old Italian restaurant, long vacant and up for sale. He buys it. That’s what he’ll do with the insurance dough – pay tribute to his mom and her mom by sharing home-cooked meals with the rest of the world. He shows the space to Bruno and Stella, who tell him that he doesn’t know doodley-squat about running a restaurant, and this is a rather expensive endeavor, which makes me think Joe might need more supportive friends. He’s taking a risk and following his heart, you dinks!

They come around though – Bruno, who happens to be a contractor, helps him renovate. Meanwhile, Joe keeps his old job but has his coworker pals cover for him when he’s late, which is always, because he’s Following His Dream. And that dream involves hiring nonnas like his mom and nonna as chefs. Roberta’s the first recruit, and she’s cranky about it but reluctantly agrees. He puts an ad on Craigslist that reads “looking for nonnas,” and prompts Olivia to bring Antonella by to cook, and lures in Teresa (Shire), a former nun. Then he talks Gia (Sarandon) into seemingly totally abandoning her own hair-salon business to make pastries and other baked sweets. So far, so good. He’s built it. But will they come?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Nonnas is a cross between Big Fat Ethnic Comedies, grannycore stuff like Book Club and 80 for Brady, and, for about the first third of the movie, food-ogling films like Big Night, Pig, or, um, Good Burger?

Performance Worth Watching: Vaughn continues to be an appealing performer who can deftly toe the line between comedy and drama, and despite being the guy from Brawl in Cell Block 99, he ably breezes through a gentle, middle-of-the-road movie like Nonnas. And never discount Sarandon’s ability to be a sparkplug in a movie that could use a little juice in a scene or three.

Memorable Dialogue: Roberta has us googling Italian slang when Joe asks her if she knows the secret ingredient of his mom’s Sunday gravy recipe: “Joey, that’s like asking a woman to show you her mundate.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The main ingredient in the Nonnas recipe is cheese, but at least it’s not Velveeta. It’s more akin to the “fancy” cheese you’ll find in the deli section at WalMart, offering the illusion of authenticity despite being mass produced and sold by a megacorp. It tastes fine, but whether it’s good for a legitimate Italiano recipe is debatable.

Apologies for the hacky metaphor, but Nonnas all but begs for corny descriptives. It’s schmaltzy and lightly manipulative, but well-intentioned and good-hearted, consisting of about 49 percent easy comedy and 51 percent pathos-sopped drama. Vaughn has a few moving, tender moments as a sad guy vaguely working through his grief, and the nonna quartet provides big, broad comedic moments that range from Sarandon vamping in leather pants (which draws a laugh) to Bracco and Vaccaro bickering in shrill tones (which, I’m sorry to say, does not). The movie tries to do too much, straddling a few dramedy subgenres, but maintains a consistent light-to-mediumweight tone that prevents its various parts from spilling all over the place.

Nothing is surprising here, but what should we expect from a movie that quite literally glorifies the values of comfort food? There’s a food fight that makes all involved parties look dumb, golden-hued flashbacks to Joe’s childhood and a bit where Joe and the movie plot desperately need some -yers – prayers from the former Sister Teresa, and lawyer muscle from Olivia, a law student. Joe faces the usual bevy of roadblocks and speedbumps inherent in building-your-dream plots – money problems prompting him to refinance the house, an untimely kitchen fire, what to do when nobody comes to the restaurant once it opens, etc.

On a deeper thematic level, the screenplay offers not-empty sentiments addressing how everyone has heartbreak in their lives and therefore deserves a little grace and empathy. Some of it is phony junk that’ll set off your BS sirens, and it occasionally strains itself in an attempt to jerk tears. The best thing Nonnas does is abandon the food-porn stuff after a while, which is a relief, because whatever you’re eating while watching the movie is certainly not as good. Other “food movies” are rarely so merciful.

Our Call: Nonnas eventually won me over with its sweetness, and it should be appealing to adult audiences who want to see these actors at work and enjoy some gentle quasi-realistic drama with a few jokes tossed in. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.