The Grandmothers Are Back. And They Want Paying.
The Café Where Nobody Asked the Obvious Question
The Viennese coffeehouse has a literary tradition going back to the late 19th century. Stefan Zweig called it “a democratic club, accessible to anyone for the price of a cup of coffee.” The poet Peter Altenberg liked it so much he gave Café Central as his home address. Alfred Polgar described its regulars as “people whose hatred of their fellow human beings is as fierce as their longing for people.” They were, to a man, men. Voluble, intellectually vain and chronically behind on their bills.
Vollpension has kept the coffee and ditched everything else. The regulars here are not the customers. They are the grandmothers running the kitchen.
Michael Pollan, the American food writer who has spent his career asking what we lose every time we stop cooking for ourselves, would recognise what is happening here immediately. His argument is simple and rather devastating: when we outsource our food we lose not just skill but memory – the invisible thread that connects a dish to the people and place that made it. The grandmothers in this piece are that thread. And what is striking about every venture described here is that they arrived not a moment too soon.
The kitchen at Vollpension smells the way kitchens used to smell before the packet sauce and the meal kit arrived. Butter. Yeast. Something in the oven that has been in the oven long enough to know what it is doing. The women working in it – the Omas, as they are known – are not trained chefs. They have never needed to be. They carry their recipes in their heads, have never written any of them down, and cook the way experienced people do everything: without thinking about it, without stopping, with a physical authority that is not taught but accumulated, year by year, decade by decade, in kitchens like this one.
Frau Marianne is 77. She spent a long career in a Vienna law firm and her efforts and dedication did not, as these things so often go, leave her a rich woman. The pension she has falls well short of what comfortable living actually requires. So when she saw the Vollpension advertisement she jumped at it. Called, got the interview and as a founding member of staff has been invaluable ever since. All those years in the law gave her a sharp turn of phrase and a stock of stories that shows no sign of running dry. One of them has become the stuff of urban legend. A man apparently asked her to marry him over the cake counter – the best way to a man’s heart being, as we know, through his stomach. She said yes. Then a meaningful pause. He then asked if he could check with his wife first. The café erupted. Her response on this occasion is probably unprintable. And almost certainly not very grandmotherly.
It Started With a Cake Nobody Could Eat
Vollpension started in 2012 as a pop-up during Vienna Design Week. Two eco entrepreneurs – Mike Lanner and Moriz Piffl – had just choked on a dry and near inedible café cake and found themselves simultaneously salivating over the memory of their grandmothers’ baking. The realisation that followed was not complicated: café culture had spent years prioritising aesthetics over taste while the people who could actually bake – who carried entire repertoires in their heads without ever having written a single thing down – were being shut out entirely. As they reminisced they decided they could kill two birds with one stone. By roping in grandmothers to cook for their café venture they could simultaneously stop the cardboard cake syndrome and help beat the scourge of loneliness that has become a mark of the modern age. They would adopt people over 64 into their business plan. They put the concept to the test. The cakes were an instant hit. People loved the idea. They loved the cakes considerably more. After touring the country doing pop-ups in a van they tracked down a permanent venue. Appropriately enough in Vienna.
The name is a pun that only works in German. Vollpension means both full-board hotel stay and full state pension – the latter being for many Austrian retirees a monthly figure that makes you want to lie down in a darkened room. Women in Austria receive on average 40% less pension than men. This gap has a straightforward explanation: part-time work, career interruptions, years of caregiving that the economy does not count and does not pay for. Vollpension’s answer is not a newsletter or a panel discussion. It is an open kitchen, a paying clientele and a business that increases older employees’ monthly disposable income by around 40%. Consider that figure for a moment. Forty percent.
“This is more than just a coffee shop,” says Hannah Lux, managing partner and one of the owners. “We are working on building a community, a human way of coming together.” Walk in and you feel it. Worn armchairs, old family photographs, small ceramic sentries on every surface, a kitchen mixer jousting with a record player. It has never once wondered whether it is on trend. Technically it is flea market vintage. Do not say this to the Omas. They control the cream.
The Menu is Its Own Manifesto
Grandma Erika’s True Plant-Based Platter. Holzmichl’s Munich Freedom – white sausages, sweet mustard, a pretzel and, the menu specifies, “a very small beer, just right for getting up.” Mrs Petra’s Tomato Dream is a shakshuka. Grandpa Kurt’s Good Cheese Wagon arrives loaded with mountain cheese, spreads, rye bread and brioche. The cake – and there is always cake – is ordered via an Oma-Coin collected from the counter then chosen directly from the display. There are also Buchteln – yeast buns filled with plum jam and warm vanilla sauce. You will not walk past them. Nobody does.
When the pandemic closed the cafés the Omas did not take this lying down. They launched the BakAdemy – live Zoom classes then on-demand video courses taught from their own kitchens. First year: over a hundred classes, more than five hundred students. One of them, Karin, said: “I get to cook with young people from all over Austria. It’s so great to get to communicate with others.” The BakAdemy runs today still – studio sessions in Vienna, video for everywhere else, the teachers earning from every one. This is what happens when you stop underestimating people.
Ending the Curse of the Microwave. New York Figured It Out First.
Joe Scaravella opened Enoteca Maria on Staten Island in 2007 naming it after his mother. No restaurant experience. No business plan. He had recently lost his mother, grandmother, sister, grandfather and father in swift succession. What he had was a house near the ferry terminal and a conviction – obvious once stated, somehow invisible before – that the most brilliant cooks in any city are rarely in its restaurants. They are in its kitchens. They carry their recipes in their heads, cook the way other people breathe and have simply never been offered a counter to stand behind. Nobody had thought to offer them one.
He started with Italian nonnas. Then one evening in 2015 he invited a Pakistani grandmother to cook and the Nonnas of the World took off from there. The roster now spans grandmothers from Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Japan, Trinidad, Syria and further. Two kitchens run each service – one fixed Italian menu, one changing nightly. Tables book out weeks ahead. The cumulative cooking knowledge in that building on any given Friday is not something a catering school could manufacture in a generation. Or possibly two.
“We are not chefs,” says Maral Tseylikman from Azerbaijan, seven years in. “We are just grandmothers sharing our culture.” Women arrive Scaravella says sometimes hollowed out – bereaved, adrift, newly alone – and within weeks are incandescent. The restaurant also runs free daily classes: the nonnas teaching one-to-one, technique moving hand to hand across the counter. Netflix released Nonnas in May 2025: Vince Vaughn as Scaravella, Susan Sarandon, Talia Shire, Lorraine Bracco and Brenda Vaccaro as the nonnas. A thirty-five-seat restaurant on a Staten Island side street, now a Hollywood film. Draw your own conclusions about what audiences are actually hungry for.
London: Late to the Party, But Worth the Wait.
Independently and a decade after Staten Island – which tells you something about an idea whose time had clearly come. Peppe Corsaro left Sicily at 17, spent years surrounded by London’s restaurant scene and still found himself pining for his mother’s potato gateau and slow-cooked ragù. The solution when a friend finally put it bluntly over dinner was obvious: bring the mamma. She was googling flights before he had finished asking. In 2018 Peppe put out a Facebook call for additional mammas, nonnas and zias who might like to come to London to cook. He was inundated. La Mia Mamma now runs three London restaurants – a fourth opening imminently – where every dish from Tuscan pappa al pomodoro to Puglian pacchero al cinque pomodori is made by an Italian mother from that specific region. “We flew them over, we found them a house,” Peppe says. “It’s amazing.” It is also by any measure fully booked. Of course it is.
Asma Khan came at it from a different direction entirely. Born in Calcutta, she arrived in London in 1991, completed a PhD in Constitutional Law and began, as a way of managing homesickness, to cook. She started with dinner parties. Then a supper club from her own home. The women who came to cook with her were Indian nannies and housewives – brilliant cooks every one of them, whom nobody had ever thought to put in a professional kitchen. At Darjeeling Express, which she opened in 2017, the kitchen is staffed entirely by women – mostly in their fifties, including three grandmothers, all self-taught, many arriving after difficult personal journeys. Reporter Gourmet She was named number one on the “100 Coolest People in Food and Drink” list in 2019 and featured on Netflix’s Chef’s Table. Chefs for Impact On her 50th birthday she opened an all-female restaurant in a refugee camp. Her view of what has been lost is unsparing: “We dishonour generations of women by making them feel like all they did was cook.” Great British Chefs
Martha Stewart’s Channel Has Fewer Subscribers Than This Grandmother.
Doña Angela launched De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina – From My Ranch to Your Kitchen – from her farm in Michoacán, Mexico in August 2019. She is in her early seventies. Nearly 400 million views. Over 4 million subscribers. She cooks on a fire-fed stove, chickens audible throughout. Her daughter and son-in-law film. Every video opens with “Hola mi gente” – hello my people – and she uses no measurements, grabbing ingredients by the handful with the ease of someone who stopped second-guessing herself around 1985. She has given almost no interviews. The audience found her anyway. They always do.
The same impulse more intimate in scale built Pasta Grannies – British filmmaker Vicky Bennison’s YouTube channel featuring Italian grandmothers making pasta from their own regional recipes. Viral in 2018, James Beard Award for the book, well over a million subscribers.
In 2023 103-year-old Irma appeared on the channel making pasta with the rolling pin she has used for ninety years. The video opens with her daily kilometre walk through the hills south of Modena, then the eggs, then the dough. She came back at 104 to make tortelloni for her birthday. Told off-camera how many millions had watched she laughed: “I didn’t know I am now famous!” Then the sly grin: “You have to tell him I am a widow.”
The most explicitly preservationist project in this space is the Grandmas Project – a documentary series in which grandchildren film their grandmothers cooking family recipes, contributing films from kitchens around the world. The premise is urgent as much as it is tender: these women are the last custodians of dishes that exist nowhere else. In 2024 the project became a book – over fifty recipes from across the globe, each accompanied by the family story behind it. The grandmother in the kitchen is not just feeding her family. She is the library.
No Longer On the Kitchen Shelf or in the Backroom.
What these women share is not charm though they have it in abundance. It is authority – and something rarer than authority. It is knowledge that was never written down, never patented, never monetised, handed from one generation to the next across kitchen tables for centuries and very nearly lost entirely.
In a world where we are becoming more and more detached from our earlier history this counter-movement – anchoring us to our past, to real food, to the people who know how to make it – has been long in coming. Now that we are waking up to what we could lose we need to sit up, eat and cook. And as far as possible turn our backs on the Americanisation of food and snacking that has done so much damage to both our health and our culinary memory.
The numbers tell part of the story. Vollpension has lifted its older employees’ monthly income by 40%. Enoteca Maria fills every seat every night and has just become a Netflix film. Doña Angela has 400 million views and still hasn’t bothered with a publicist. The Grandmas Project has a book. And Irma – 104 years old, rolling pin in hand – is still making tortelloni for anyone who will sit down long enough to eat it.
The appetite is clearly there.
Vollpension: Schleifmühlgasse in Vienna’s 4th district and Johannesgasse in the 1st. Baking masterclasses at backademie.com. Enoteca Maria: 27 Hyatt Street, Staten Island, Wednesday to Sunday – free ferry from Lower Manhattan. La Mia Mamma: three London locations, fourth opening soon. Darjeeling Express: Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London. Pasta Grannies and De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina: both on YouTube, both immediately addictive. The Grandmas Project book: available now.
