Rossella Rago's Cooking with Nonna is a Recipe for Success

While the grandmothers featured in each episode often steal the show from its host, it is Rossella who is the catalyst behind Cooking with Nonna’s success. An award-winning author of several cookbooks and the winner of the Food Network’s 24 Hour Restaurant Battle, Rossella has traveled the world over throughout her career. Her story, however, begins in what she describes as a typical Italian American household in New Jersey.

Rossella’s fascination with culinary arts can be traced back to the time spent in the kitchen with her grandmother. This close relationship played a pivotal role in the creation of the series.

“My nonna (Italian for ‘grandma’) cooked all the time,” said Rossella, “so from the age of five years old, I learned a lot of her techniques through osmosis.”

Beginning with simple tasks such as stirring sauce or salting pasta water, her grandmother gradually showed her a wide range of cooking methods that are passed down between generations.

“When you grow up in a first-generation, Italian American household, cooking is central to everything,” she explained. “We’d make focaccia every Sunday morning, so I would awaken to those aromas coming from the kitchen. Each September, the entire family would gather together to can tomatoes. So many great memories.”

While she’s been cooking alongside her grandmother since she was a preschooler, it was her unconventional living arrangements as a St. John’s undergraduate that provided the inspiration to launch Cooking with Nonna.

“My father was very old school and didn’t want me going away to college,” the native of New Jersey explained. “As a result, I shared a bedroom with my grandmother in her basement apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, since it was about halfway between the Queens, NY, and Staten Island, NY, campuses.”

Rossella’s commute began each day with a 6 a.m. subway ride from Bay Ridge. “I’d transfer to a bus to Staten Island, get off that bus, and take another one that went up Grymes Hill, which left me at the Staten Island campus for my classes in the morning,” she explained. “Then, I would take a St. John’s shuttle bus from Staten Island to the Queens campus and take my afternoon classes there. When I was done, I would take a bus to the subway, probably fall asleep along the way, and then ride it all the way back to Brooklyn. I’d get home around 8 p.m.”

Fortunately, there was always a home-cooked Italian meal waiting for her, courtesy of her grandmother. “The commute was exhausting, but I ate really well during college. Unwittingly, that experience was my culinary school, because whenever I wasn’t in class or traveling, I was with her and I was able to absorb so much.”

Rossella majored in Italian Literature (at the Queens campus) with a minor in Secondary Education (which she studied in Staten Island).

“I was surrounded by people from similar backgrounds,” she said, reflecting on the friends she made at St. John’s and in the Italian Cultural Society. “We were all thrilled to have so much freedom—because just a generation ago, young women like us weren’t always allowed to go to college by our families.” While she has fond memories of both campuses, Rossella felt a genuine connection to the University’s Staten Island campus.

“The Queens campus felt like a university—like something out of a movie—but the Staten Island campus was so cozy,” she explained. “There was something really sweet and personal about it. I had so many great experiences there.”

As a student, most of her free time was spent in transit between the two campuses and her grandmother’s apartment. She did, however, find a home away from home on Staten Island.

“People assume I was in a sorority in college, but in all honestly, my sorority was Spellman Café at the Staten Island campus,” she said. “Our little group of misfits hung out in the café with this fabulous woman who worked there, Annette. She was this chain-smoking Staten Islander who did not mince words. She was such a character.”

It was at a family gathering where the idea for Cooking with Nonna came to light. “My father was teasing me about what I wanted to do with my life,” said Rossella. “I joked with him that I should have a cooking show. I mean, what could be a better job than that?”

They bounced ideas around until she came up with a concept for a show about cooking with grandmothers. They settled on the name Cooking with Nonna, and started laying the groundwork for the show.

“A week later, my dad bought the web domain, cookingwithnonna.com and had a rolling cooking island constructed at our house,” she recalled. “We hired a production company and started shooting episodes.”
In addition to cooking with her own nonna, Romana Sciddurlo, Rossella has teamed up with approximately 50 different nonnas over the course of the show’s hundreds of episodes. While each nonna puts a unique spin on her recipes, they are all well-versed in the culinary arts.

“They all know their stuff frontwards and backwards,” she exclaimed. “Malcolm Gladwell once said that to become an expert at something, you have to practice it for 10,000 hours. Well, my nonna, for example, is 90 and has been cooking for 85 years, so she is absolutely an expert in the kitchen.”

While food is the focus of the series, for Rossella, it’s also about preserving history. “These nonnas are part of the greatest generation that ever lived and it’s so important to document them,” she said. “They are the ones who really deserve all the attention and accolades.”

Today, Cooking with Nonna is a runaway social media success, with more than 830,000 followers on Facebook; 125,000 followers on X (formerly known as Twitter); more than 66,000 subscribers on YouTube; and 57,000 fans on TikTok.

Rossella has authored several cookbooks, including The Cooking with Nonna Cookbook; Cooking with Nonna: A Year of Italian Holidays; and Cooking with Nonna: Sunday Dinners with La Famiglia, and has expanded the brand into an online marketplace, www.bottegadellanonna.com, which features imported foods, hard-to-find kitchen utensils, and a clothing line—each thoughtfully curated by the St. John’s alumna.

“When we first started, nobody was an influencer,” she said. “We would use an old cheese grater on an episode and people would reach out and say, ‘Where can I get one of those?’ We figured out which items people really wanted and how to import things like knives and cheese graters from Italy.”

“In the early days, we were shipping out of my parents’ basement in New Jersey,” said Rossella. “Then, they sold their house and were living with me in my three-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, so we shipped out of there. Now we have a warehouse and eight employees.” Since 2019, they’ve shipped more than 70,000 orders worldwide.

Despite her success, Rossella stays close to her roots. She still lives in the same Bensonhurst neighborhood where she spent many of her formative years, and she is still close to her St. John’s classmates.

“No matter where you go, you always run into people who went to St. John’s,” she said. “It’s funny, because even though I am the least athletic person on the planet, I still find myself shouting ‘Go, Red Storm!’ when I meet a fellow Johnnie.”