She was bigger than her surroundings.
Every delicatessen with a grandmother on the sign says she taught them to cook. This one is named after a woman who taught her grandson something rather more useful than that.
Monda
She was Andrea's grandmother, in a small village in Italy. A mother. A homemaker. A home chef — the kind whose cooking everyone in the family still measures everything else against.
But that is the part of her that fits easily on a sign, and it is not the part that matters most.
“Real life Nonna Monda was a mother, my grandmother, a home maker, a home chef — but she was so much more.
She loved life, loved to put on her makeup and dance, she smoked, she enjoyed a drink.
I grew up in a small village, often surrounded by people with small minds, but my nonna taught me how to find my own happiness, scrunched in the back of her tiny Fiat full of smoke on the way to a dance hall.”
Andrea
“She was so much bigger than her surroundings.”
Why the shop carries her name
Andrea came up through hospitality. Peter spent his career in financial markets. In 2025 they opened a small Italian delicatessen on Plaza Blanca and put his grandmother's name over the door.
Not as a marketing story. Because the way she lived — generous, a bit defiant, happiest with people round a table — is the thing they were actually trying to build.
In Andrea's words: “We can only hope that Nonna Monda will thrive in the way she did in life.”
The heartbeat of the family.