Sylvan Park’s Cafe Nonna

For the past two years, Caffé Nonna has been keeping the things that are good and working on the things that aren’t. It is the cozy dining room that reflects a Northern Italian trattoria. Out are the feta cheese sticks and pesto cream sauce. At the helm of this transition is operations manager Becca Bendaj and new chef James Kelsey.

A transplant from Las Cruces, N.M., may seem an unlikely fit for a restaurant serving the rustic food of the Abruzzo region of Italy, but Chef James Kelsey is perfect at Nonna. He based recipes on those from founder and chef Dan Maggipinto’s grandmothers. And despite 25 years in the kitchen, James approaches the menu as a newbie, deconstructing dishes while evoking the familiar and homey.

Experimentation is his jam, and he’s brought some great changes to the menu. The arancini has been reborn, stuffed with pearl mozzarella and a creamy pea parsley sauce. The baked feta sticks have been replaced with triangles of pan-fried panela cheese, topped with toasted bread crumbs and black sea salt and served with a Calabrian chili marinara and a drizzle of blueberry fennel alfredo. The traditional pasta that had a sun-dried tomato cream sauce was reborn into a rigatoni with sun-dried tomato sauce that nixed the cream and is now served with a double sun-dried tomato broth, fire-roasted peppers, harissa and goat cheese cream. Operations manager Becca Bendaj brought in all Italian wines, gussied up service and the dining room and brought in James. 

In 2019 Dan brought on a series of partners dedicated to keeping Nonna thriving and authentic to its roots. This includes family holding company, Snell Ventures, which is dedicated to preserving great family businesses and giving earnings charitably back to the community through their Snell Family Foundation.  This allowed Dan to step away from active management and focus on his sauce business (nonnasgourmetfoods.com), which donates all proceeds to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.

The team at Caffe Nonna is in the process of launching a new bar program, a renovated interior and new dishes. They also make gelato, special flavors every week. And they hand-make pesto in a mortar and pestle on the weekends. Better get there fast.