The Woodlands’ 90-Year-Old Italian Restaurant Matriarch Shares Her Best Secrets — What Nonna Elda Cooks at Home

Editor’s note: This is the second story in a series on what top Texas chefs cook at home

Via Emilia has been one of the standout Italian restaurants in The Woodlands since 2011, after first opening in Houston nearly 25 years ago. Elda Orioli, better known as Nonna Elda, has been at the helm in the kitchen at Via Emilia and in her home. And she’s still going strong at age 90. She still cooks pasta at home by hand.

The Orioli restaurant family’s beloved matriarch has loved cooking since her early years in Ravenna, Italy. Her restaurant career spans two continents and six decades. Elda’s love of cooking has been passed down to her sons and grandsons, who run successful Italian restaurants in The Woodlands themselves.

Nonna Elda learned to cook at her mother and grandmother’s side as a small child in Italy, and enjoyed it very much.

In her home, Nonna cooks daily, unless she’s having restaurant carryout, and she loves making pasta for her family. While the process of creating the dough is done by hand, she uses her much beloved pasta machine to complete the process and often involves her great grandchildren.

“I use the pasta machine to compress the dough and make it into layers,” Nonna tells PaperCity The Woodlands.

The Orioli family has several restaurants in the area, but everyone makes the time to come to Nonna’s for pasta on Sundays.

“Sundays are the one day that the entire family is not working,” Nonna’s grandson Enrique Orioli says. “So that one day that we can get together.”

Two of the family’s favorites are passatelli and cappelletti.  According to Enrique Orioli, all Nonna has to do is call and say that she’s cooking and the family heads over.  Because the passatelli is a stiff dough, it takes great strength to push through the press. These days, Enrique lends a strong arm for Nonna.

When her children were young and in school in Italy, the school day was very different. Kids came home for lunch from about noon to 3 pm every day. In addition to a pasta lunch, Nonna remembers always having a different cake for dessert every day for her kids. She continues to make cakes. Her favorites are an Italian cream cake and apple cake.

Kitchen Tips From Nonna

While she’s cooking, Nonna Elda wears one of her Italian aprons. There is a secret step to one of her favorites recipes — spinach pasta — she’s sharing with PaperCity. The key comes in how you cook the spinach, Nonna reveals.

“Don’t boil the spinach to cook it. Steam it,” she shares. “It’s easier to get all the water out.”

As for the sauce? It’s the featured sauce at Via Emilia — the bolognese, Nonna notes.

“(The bolognese) is very special to my hometown, and it’s different from the rest of other regions of Italy,” she says.

While her pasta machine is the kitchen workhorse, Nonna does admit to having a difficult time limiting her kitchen favorites to a a few tools.

“I have a closet full of different tools and different things to make different recipes,” she says.

The Orioli family appreciates each and every one of those tools used to create family memories for a lifetime. Sundays at Nonna’s. What could be more perfect than that?

Via Emilia, Azzurro Italian Coastal Cuisine Terra Vino and Marcozza Trattorio are The Woodlands area restaurants that are operated under the Orioli family restaurant group.