What was Nonna Urban Eatery?
The most interesting Italian restaurant in Old Town for a few years was run by a Venezuelan-born sushi chef, and the first thing on the menu was a cucumber roll.
Nonna Urban Eatery opened in February 2017 at 7240 E Main St, in a courtyard storefront set back from the street at the east end of the Main Street arts district, with yellow patio chairs out front and an open kitchen inside. The owners were a husband-and-wife team. Chef Gian Franco Brugaletta had trained as a sushi chef in Caracas, studied in Italy and France, and opened Buddha-Bar Monte-Carlo in Monaco as its head sushi chef before landing in Scottsdale. Valentina Huerta, who had earned an MBA in Nice and managed boutique hotels on the Riviera, ran the room and the wine list.
The food was Italian at its core, handmade pasta, arancini, bruschetta, grilled octopus, with the chef’s background leaking in at the edges: seared yellowtail sashimi, edamame, and the cucumber lollipop rolls that became the house calling card. The menu changed with the seasons and often daily, and the wine list was built from small producers and a surprising number of Arizona bottles, from Callaghan Vineyards to Aridus, poured by an owner who could tell you why.
It was, by every account, a matchbox: a few tables, a mural behind the bar, a lot of daylight. Nonna closed in 2022, after five years that included a pandemic pivot to a food truck and a prix fixe format, and Gio Osso’s Piccolo Virtù took the space that December. Honest verdict: a genuinely personal restaurant, occasionally too mild on the plate, and exactly the kind of room Old Town says it wants and rarely keeps.
Dinner in the courtyard
You arrived early or you waited. Nonna did not take reservations except for large parties, and the difference between five-thirty and seven was the difference between a table and a stroll through the galleries. The courtyard patio, bright yellow and shaded, was the overflow and, on a spring evening, the better seat.
You started with the sushi chef’s tells. The cucumber lollipop rolls were the dish first-timers were sent, and a food blogger who was otherwise lukewarm called them “magic.” Arancini, stuffed with Italian ham and cheese or with scallop and crab, and a three-way bruschetta plate filled out the opening round, and prosciutto-wrapped melon sat next to edamame without anyone finding it strange.
You ordered pasta by the season. The kitchen rolled its own, and the shapes and sauces followed the calendar: a lemony campanelle with asparagus and salmon in spring, tagliatelle bolognese and a rigatoni that regulars named as the standouts in cooler months, and a pasta e vongole that was the safest bet in any season. Grilled octopus was the recurring second course. Critics noted the seasoning could run mild; regulars said that was the point, and asked for the pepper.
You let Valentina pour. The wine list was the room’s quiet distinction, small producers and Arizona labels most Old Town rooms ignored. Fridays brought Cava and Prosecco at five dollars a glass, which turned the courtyard into the arts district’s best-value aperitivo hour.
You finished with the butter cake, warm, with fruit compote, the reason tables turned slowly.
A small room in a big-restaurant decade
Nonna belonged to a short-lived cohort of chef-owned rooms that tried to make Main Street’s gallery blocks into a dining district in the late 2010s. The template had been set a few steps away: Virtù Honest Craft had opened in 2013 in the Bespoke Inn courtyard and collected national attention, and Sel arrived on Main Street in 2017, the same year as Nonna, with a jewel-box prix fixe. For a moment the arts district had a real cluster of small, owner-run restaurants with nothing to do with the bar scene south of Indian School Road.
What made Nonna different within that cluster was its lineage. Brugaletta’s sushi training gave the Italian food an unusual lightness and a taste for raw and marinated openers, and the couple’s years in Monaco and Nice gave the operation a European rhythm, including the habit of closing for short stretches to travel and eat. Huerta’s wine program, with its Arizona emphasis, put the restaurant in the same conversation as FnB, which had been evangelizing state wine on Craftsman Court since 2009. Nonna was smaller and quieter than any of them, and survived on regulars rather than press.
The 2020s pushed the couple toward the food truck they ran alongside the room and a fixed-price menu that made a tiny dining room pencil out. Reviews trail off in mid-2022, the dining room closed that year, and by December, Gio Osso, the chef behind Virtù, had opened Piccolo Virtù in the same courtyard storefront, an à la carte room that itself lasted only about a year. The Nonna truck later listed a Phoenix address.
Honest assessment: Nonna was never going to be a landmark, and its food was occasionally as gentle as its owners. But it was one of the few Old Town restaurants of its era that felt like it belonged to specific people with specific histories, and the cucumber roll at the top of an Italian menu was a better story than most restaurants ever tell.