Oddity Central

New York Restaurant Employs Cooking Grandmas Instead of Professional Chefs
Rich Chinese Bachelors Are Touring Siberia in Search of Beautiful Brides
Australian man Spends 12 Years Turning Potatoes into Dairy-Free Cheese Called ‘Chato’

New York Restaurant Employs Cooking Grandmas Instead of Professional Chefs

Posted: 12 Oct 2016 11:31 AM PDT

When it comes to tasty food, nothing beats grandma’s cooking! Well, except maybe more grandmas cooking in the same kitchen, which is exactly what goes on at Staten Island’s Enoteca Maria, a charming restaurant that employs grandmas from various parts of the world, instead of professional chefs.

Enoteca Maria owner Jody Scaravella says that he came up with the idea of placing grandmothers in a restaurant kitchen about 12 years ago, after suffering a series of tragic losses. His grandmother, his mother and his sister had passed away within a few years of each other, and the idea of having an Italian grandmother in the kitchen just felt comforting to him. He got his first cooks by posting an ad in the paper seeking ‘Italian housewives to cook regional dishes’. “I was still building the restaurant then, so I asked them to come to my place to cook instead — I live in the neighborhood. And they came with dishes, and their husbands and a few grandchildren they were looking after for the day. The whole thing was like a Fellini movie,” Scaravella remembers.

But that was only the beginning. These days, the unique New York restaurant has a rotating staff of grandmothers from around 30 different places around the world, including Palestine, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Nigeria and Algeria. They are known as ‘nonnas’ – Italian for ‘grandmas’ – and take turns in cooking traditional recipes from their respective culture, offering patrons the chance to experience new and exciting dishes virtually every night.

enoteca-maria-nonnas

Posted: 12 Oct 2016 08:32 AM PDT

Faced with a shortage of eligible women back home, China’s successful businessmen are apparently turning their attention to Russia. They are apparently paying thousands of dollars to go on ‘wife tours’ in Siberia, hoping to find the brides of their dreams.

Elena Suvorova, head of a marriage agency in Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city, organized the first ‘wife tour’ for six Chinese bachelors last year. The event was apparently a success, with some of the men actually starting relationships with a few of the 25 girls invited to compete for their affection. So this year, Suvorova’s agency, OSD Center, held another wife tour for five Chinese men, aged 25 to 46, who came all the way from Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen, in search for a suitable life partner.

“For them, a Russian woman is like a present,” Elena told the Siberian Times. “Men want to get married, and are committed for serious relationships.”

chinese-bachelors

Posted: 12 Oct 2016 06:53 AM PDT

Andrew Dyhin, an Australian inventor and founder of the PotatoMagic company, claims that he has spent the last 12 years researching ways of transforming common potatoes into a cheese-like product that is completely dairy-free.

“The product is called chato – cheese potato. It looks like cheese and melts like cheese, but it is nothing but potato,” Dyhin says. While he won’t reveal the exact production process, he says that the potatoes are peeled, liquefied and processed with no added ingredients into a basic product that can be melted, sliced, turned into cubes or mixed with water and other ingredients to make dips, just like cheese. The PotatoMagic founder said that he is confident that chato can become a sustainable plant based alternative to cheese, milk, custard and even ice-cream.

chato-potatomagic