Rosaria Iovino, executive chef of Girasole, grew up in Afragola, near Naples, where she learned by watching her mother, Concetta Conti, cook. Once she got old enough to help, she was shown how to roll out pasta. “I was cooking from six years old,” she says. “I couldn’t reach the counter, so my mother would pull up a stool for me to stand on.”
The daughter of a butcher, Giovanni Conti, Rosaria also learned her way around a side of beef early on. “She grew up in a butcher shop,” says Rosario’s brother-in-law Gino Iovino, the restaurant’s 56-year-old owner. “She can take a cow and make it into a million pieces.”
As she matured, Rosaria began making dishes like beef braciole, osso buco, roasted vegetables and pastries. During holidays, she and her mother, who died in 2008, would turn out cookies by the hundreds.
“With each generation it keeps improving,” Rosaria says. “My mamma learned everything she knew from her mamma, and I learned everything I know from my mamma, only better.”
She still loves making pasta, her favorite being gnocchi. “It’s all about the hands, how you work it,” she says, demonstrating how a precise flick of her index finger separates each potato dumpling from the main strand. Her two sons both work at Girasole as waiters, and the eldest, Salvatore, has shown an interest in cooking.
Another key player is Rosealba Morici, an Iovino cousin who helped launch the two Girasole restaurants (the other is in Philadelphia). Living nine months of the year in Bari, Italy, and three months in Atlantic City, Rosealba, who is a nonna herself, brings new ideas and technology from Italy when she visits each spring, according to Gino. With a certificate from the Cordon Bleu’s Culinary Italian school, Rosealba, 61, also keeps up on the latest cooking trends in Italy, which she shares with the kitchen staff at Girasole.
The pivotal Iovino nonna, however, would be Michela Iovino, the late mother of Gino, who taught her six children either how to cook, or at least appreciate her cooking. “Food was always number one in our family,” says Gino, recalling trips to the fish market in Naples with his mother to pick out sea bream or octopus. The smells of lasagna and risotto would come from Michela’s kitchen, and from the kitchen of Michela’s mother, Nunziata, who lived right next door.
Between Italy and the United States, the Iovino clan now numbers close to 300—including 17 employed at Girasole in Atlantic City and eight at Girasole in Philadelphia.
As American tastes have evolved, so has the menu, getting away from the heavy sauces Michela and her generation made, and moving toward lighter, healthier versions of traditional dishes.
“We don’t cook our gravy for six hours the way our mamma used to—it’s nice tasting, but you can’t move afterwards,” says Gino. “After dinner with us you feel good. You can get up and go dancing, or maybe you want to go home and make love.”