Flour, water, and whatever the boats bring.
— Nonna Maria Caravello · 1968–2024
In the autumn of 1968, Nonna Maria Caravello stepped off a train in Halifax carrying a wooden pasta board wrapped in a tablecloth, a tin of seeds from her mother's garden in Cefalù, and almost no English. Her husband Salvatore had come ahead for the fishing. Everyone told her the water here was too cold for anything to grow.
She grew tomatoes anyway, in a cold frame behind a rented house on Pelham Street. She sold bread to the Portuguese crew on the wharf. For forty years she cooked for other people's restaurants, and for anyone who knocked.
Nonna's by the Sea opened in 2011 in a chandlery built in 1878, twelve tables in a room that still smells faintly of tar and rope. Maria worked the pasta board until she was eighty-four. Her grandson Marco runs the pass now, and the board is still there, under the flour, worn to a shallow bowl in the middle.
1968
Halifax
A pasta board wrapped in a tablecloth, and a tin of Cefalù seeds.
1974
Pelham Street
Tomatoes under glass. Bread sold to the crews on the wharf.
2011
The Chandlery
Twelve tables in a room built in 1878. The oven is lit.
2024
The Board
Worn to a shallow bowl in the middle. Still in service.
The board came across the Atlantic before either of us did. Every morning it gets flour, and every night it gets scraped clean.
Nonna Maria Caravello
1938–2024 · Cefalù, Sicilia
At the board until she was eighty-four.
Chef & Owner
Marco cooked eleven years in Modena and Palermo before coming home to the harbour he grew up in. He is the third generation to work this board and the first to write anything down.
My grandmother never wrote a recipe. She would say the dough tells you. It took me a decade in other people's kitchens to understand she was being precise, not poetic.
At the pass since 2011
Sourcing
Here · Nova Scotia
There · Italia
Come sit at her table
Twelve tables above the harbour, Tuesday through Sunday. The oven is lit by four, and the pasta is already rolled.
