Grazie Nonna opened in DC’s Midtown Center1 (September 2022), marketed as a throwback Italian-American restaurant and pizzeria. It’s a partnership between restaurateur Casey Patten, founder of the late, beloved Taylor Gourmet and other local restaurants, and Caribbean-themed Bammy’s chef Gerald Addison.
With seating inside for 80 and outside for 70, Grazie Nonna is a massive undertaking. The double-height ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows, and sparkly chandeliers make both a dramatic statement and a cacophonous echo chamber2 when the restaurant fills up.
Grazie Nonna’s website features a sepia-toned photo of an older, unidentified woman3 who, a staff member assured DishingPizza, is indeed Patten’s nonna. The kitchen staff wears matching T-shirts emblazoned with line art depicting Nonna. Vintage photos, we’re told, of Nonna and other family hang high up on the only walls that aren’t glass. Grazie Nonna’s Instagram profile states that it is inspired by those neighborhood Italian-American restaurants that you’ve never heard of, but fall in love with the moment you walk in. It’s hard to imagine the actual Nonna cottoning to this glam space that few would love at first, or even second, sight. The restaurant tenaciously markets itself as the type of place where you’d find Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra tucked in a corner nursing brown liquid in tumblers, yet Grazie Nonna bears absolutely no resemblance to this mythical red-sauce joint.
The menu names its pasta section, using the old-school vernacular, Macaroni, yet they serve bucatini, lumache, and mafalde — craft pastas that are decidedly not macaroni4. In so many ways, Grazie Nonna is a facade, a set piece, a Disney version of an Italian restaurant. But if the pizza’s great, who cares?
Sitting at the pizza bar, DishingPizza got a front-row view of the process. Three pizzaioli spin the remarkably elastic dough onto 14″ round pans, spray on sauce5, add cheese and toppings, and insert into a PizzaMaster steel deck oven to bake at 575°F. For all of DishingPizza’s gripes about the restaurant’s throwback-Italian theatrics, they have a goddamned great dough recipe. The thin-crust is sublime – chewy with a slight tang, of a quality better than many bakery loaves.
Can a superb crust offset suboptimal tomato sauce and cheese? Not entirely, though the crust goes a long way. Just to quantify a bit, the mozzarella cheese and garlicky tomato sauce are good, but don’t equal the crust’s quality.
Grazie Nonna is bustling, but it isn’t warm. DishingPizza had plenty of questions for the three underworked pizzaioli just a couple of feet away. However, perhaps weary of performing like Shamu at Sea World, these three wouldn’t even make eye contact. Some of the waitstaff looked similarly dispirited while others looked downright glum.
DishingPizza has dished about many pizzerias but has never encountered such a confounding incongruity of marketing hype versus reality. For comparison, Maggiano’s Little Italy trades on a similar Sunday night at Nonna’s house vibe in their family-style presentation, without pinning it to anyone’s actual nonna.
Grazie Nonna occupies some exceedingly expensive real estate, so it follows that the restaurant is pricey6 not even including a 4% non-gratuity surcharge. Worth it? Glitz, glam, and razzle-dazzle is in the eye of the beholder.
Yet another disappointment was the day-after reheating that yielded leftover slices too soggy to easily pick up — a typical wood-fired malady, but criminal from a steel-deck oven. A dough recipe that produces a spectacular out-of-the-oven crust, but doesn’t hold up to later scrutiny — an apt metaphor for Grazie Nonna.
Grazie Nonna
1100 15th St NW, Washington, DC 20005
Pizza type: New York
Pizza quality: 🍕🍕
Overall experience: ⭐⭐
Pie – 14″ round: $24
Pie price per square inch: $0.16
- If you’ve never heard of Midtown Center, join the club. That’s because “Midtown Center” is the developer-conjured name for this $650 million commercial behemoth. Although DishingPizza lacks the developers’ marketing savvy, a more accurate but less catchy name for this micro-neighborhood is “WaPo Graveyard,” as it’s the site of the former Washington Post building. ↩︎
- Not a great spot for anyone hard of hearing, but a terrific spot for young people to lose their hearing. ↩︎
- Given all the Nonna adulation, DishingPizza is curious why the website lacks an ‘About’ page that talks her up. If DishingPizza hadn’t received an assurance from a staff member, it might question Nonna’s authenticity. ↩︎
- Well, okay, in some circles bucatini, a tubular spaghetti-like pasta also known as perciatelli, could be considered a macaroni sub-species, but not the other two. ↩︎
- Yep, you read that right. The sauce is sprayed, not ladled. DishingPizza wonders if Nonna had a spray bottle for her sauce, too. ↩︎
- The Michelin Guide gives Grazie Nonna a cost rating of $$$, befitting this restaurant with $55 roast chicken, $65 branzino, and wine bottles starting at $56. ↩︎
We have a few places like this here in NJ too – overpriced and overhyped.