With her series “The People’s Places,” contributor Jennifer Justus provides short takes on longtime local restaurants, markets and bars that deserve another look.
Remember Nashville in 1999? The Titans took the field at Adelphia Coliseum for the first time ever. Bill Purcell was elected mayor of Metro Nashville, while Martina, McGraw and Chesney ruled the country charts — each had two No. 1 songs that year. The Preds were just a baby organization in their second season, while Britney Spears sold out the Grand Ole Opry House in support of her first album “… Baby One More Time.”
Neighborhoods like Sylvan Park felt different then. People pumped gas where Edley’s Bar-B-Que stands today, and the bygone meat-and-three Sylvan Park Restaurant still existed alongside the venerable McCabe Pub. No roundabout. No Park Cafe. No Neighbors Bar — but plenty of neighbors hungry for a mom-and-pop Italian place.
“We hit the ground running,” says Caffe Nonna chef and owner Daniel Maggipinto, who opened his Sylvan Park restaurant in 1999. “With no marketing or anything.”
Maggipinto moved to Nashville in 1996 from New York City, and he brought with him his own spin on Italian family recipes that he worked out in his grandmother’s kitchen in the North Bronx. Maggipinto met his wife Maria in Manhattan when they both worked for a stint in dining services for the Hearst Corp. Maria had been a ballet dancer and part-time flight attendant. Incidentally, she comes from Nashville meat-and-three royalty as the granddaughter to Hap Townes, the man who turned rolling pie wagons into a beloved brick-and-mortar carrying his own name. The two married by 1994, and when Maria’s father got sick, she suggested a move to Nashville.
They rented a 25-foot U-Haul and came down to live at an apartment complex on Hayes Street. Maggipinto worked a slew of restaurants that are no longer around — from Arthur’s and Cakewalk to Sammy B’s on Music Row. He helped open Tony’s Lake House Grill in Hendersonville, and then he opened his own place, a Mediterranean-style restaurant called Dancing Bear on Church Street. He has photos from those days cooking with their son on his hip. But Church Street wasn’t a dining destination at that time, and the restaurant closed after about a year-and-a-half. That’s when investors approached him about opening an Italian spot.
When I moved to Nashville in 2005, I asked locals where to eat, and Caffe Nonna was often the response I got. These days, the city has more Italian-style options than ever, from the swanky Yolan, Carne Mare, City House and Trattoria Il Mulino to favorites like Nicky’s Coal Fired and Mangia. That’s not to mention Bella Napoli, Moto, Giovanni — the list goes on. Even with all the latter-day options, Caffe Nonna still stays busy. On a recent Saturday, reservations were booked until 9 p.m. My dining companion and I found a spot on the covered patio next to a 10-top celebrating a high school graduation.
Wearing T-shirts and shorts and summer sundresses, folks rolled in and filled the 50 seats indoors or on one of the two patios. Time has weathered just about every edge in the place. Our server, who had the comfortable and unpretentious air of a seasoned pro, dropped the names of two other Nashville institutions within minutes of greeting us. When we told him we had been at Centennial Park earlier, he mentioned an event happening at the Springwater. He’d heard about it at Brown’s Diner, where he sometimes plays with a band called Southern Funk Orchestra.
For dinner, we split the vegetarian bruschetta, ribbons of carrot and red onion in sunset colors of orange and pink. Piled into a mountain with a confetti of chopped garlic shot throughout, the vegetables rested on a thick slice of bread soaking up the white-wine-and-butter sauce. After a couple of crisp salads, we split the Lasagna Nonna, an old menu standby with layers of flavor and texture from butternut squash, creamy cheese sauces, the tang of marinara and brilliant green bites of fresh spinach.
Lasagna
That rustic recipe, as well as other favorites like the lamb shank or Seafood Angeline, draw from a well of family influences and Maggipinto’s own experience.
“Who influenced me in loving food?” Maggipinto says. “Several women in my family — two of my grandmothers, an aunt and my mom cooked as well.” From family gardens on New York lots the size of postage stamps to home cooking and family businesses, he had a lot of inspiration. One set of grandparents ran a luncheonette feeding workers in New York with breakfast plates and chicken Parm sandwiches. Growing up, he worked summers at his aunt’s motel restaurant in the Catskills.
During the uncertainty of the pandemic, Maggipinto got his real estate license. He also keeps up an operation jarring the Caffe Nonna marinara, a project he started after his daughter died of a rare brain cancer just before her second birthday. As a true labor of love, he used to leave work at Caffe Nonna and then spend a couple hours packing up sauce in his business partner’s basement where they stored the bottles. “To save on the cost of the shipping, I would take orders to UPS myself,” he says.
These days, the operation is more streamlined. Maggipinto donates the money he makes from his sauce to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital through The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee and the Zoë Marie Brain Tumor Research Fund, which is named for his late daughter. “Every little bit helps change things in small increments sometimes,” he says. “It feels good.” Locals can find the sauce in grocery stores like Turnip Truck, but Maggipinto says the big orders come after episodes of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives featuring Caffe Nonna air in syndication. “All I gots to say is Rao’s, watch out,” Maggipinto says, “ ’cause we’re coming for you.”
Maggipinto, who will be 63 in July, spends less time in the kitchen than he once did. He’s earned it. And he feels good about the team he has in place. In addition to manager Becca Bendaj and Jason Strobel, who heads up the kitchen, he has kitchen staff that has been at the restaurant more than a decade. Two guys who go by Chino and Juvi were hired by Maggipinto as dishwashers and trained over time on the line. Juvi’s wife Maria and the pair’s kids have all worked at the restaurant.
“To work with people that want the same thing, and recognize the brand and not just an Italian restaurant, and what it stands for here is really amazing,” says Maggipinto.
“My name is not in lights up there, and that never came to my mind when I started the place,” he says. Instead, he says, he just wants to keep customers happy — from “first-timers and old-time regulars and everyone in between. That’s the most important thing to me.”
