Not your average Nonna: How nostalgia for home sparked this beloved Vancouver Italian eatery

Walking into Casareccio, a tiny storefront in Kitsilano, is like entering an Italian Nonna’s kitchen. A pot of ragu that takes two men to lift has been simmering for six hours, a sheet pan of lasagna cools on the counter, and there is a Nonna, too, gently coaxing fresh pasta into nests.

Maria Clarkson rolls her hands across the wood table to demonstrate how her grandmother made bucatini, a long pasta with a hole in the centre — her favourite.

From the time she was five or six, Maria was learning to hand roll pasta from her Nonna Carmela in her hometown of Mammola, Calabria. Maria cooked on a wood fire stove for her six younger siblings as soon as she was tall enough to stir the pot.

“Food was the centre of our home,” says Maria, 66.

She is tiny and bursting with smiles, warmth and comfort, but she is not your average Nonna. Around her wrist curves a tattoo of a rosary, in honour of her mother, and other tattoos that represent resilience: “I am enough” and “everything happens for a reason.”