Nonna knows best! anana turning culinary memory into digital legacy

We have grown accustomed to recipes arriving at the speed of a swipe, frantic 30-second videos, immaculate plating, the clinical pinch-of-this-gram-of-that measurements and polished TV chefs who seem to command every ingredient with military precision.

But some of the world’s most precious recipes were never written down at all.

They lived instead in the hands of grandmothers, in kitchen cupboards, on flour-dusted counters and in the instinctive gestures of people who could tell, without measuring, when a dish was ready. They were recipes remembered rather than recorded, tasted rather than calculated, passed from one pair of hands to another through generations.

And with every generation that passes, some of them risk disappearing.

That quiet loss is what inspired Teodoro Mefalopulos, co-founder of heritage culinary platform anana, to build something decidedly different: not another recipe website, but a living digital archive of the food, people and stories that make family cooking worth preserving.

In an exclusive conversation with Arab Times, Mefalopulos spoke about the memories that gave birth to anana, the irreplaceable wisdom of grandparents and his ambition to preserve culinary traditions far beyond Italy.

A recipe lost is a story lost

For Mefalopulos, anana did not arrive as a lightning-bolt idea scribbled on a whiteboard. It grew slowly from childhood, memory and loss.

His grandparents had nurtured his love of food and cooking. The family kitchen became a place where food was not merely prepared, but experienced where recipes were demonstrated rather than dictated and where knowledge seemed to pass almost effortlessly from one generation to the next.

But as his grandparents grew older and began passing away, he discovered a painful truth.

He was losing more than people.

He was losing recipes.

“I began noticing, sadly, that as I started losing my grandparents, I was losing some of these recipes that no one had taken the time to write down,” he recalls.

The realization was both simple and profound. A recipe could vanish not because it was forgotten, but because nobody had stopped long enough to preserve it.

That prompted a question: Could these extraordinary family recipes be captured on an international scale without stripping away the instinct and intimacy that made them special in the first place?

That question eventually became anana.

One childhood memory remains particularly vivid. Mefalopulos once tried to recreate a traditional Roman dish of summer tomatoes stuffed with rice and baked with potatoes. His attempt, by his own admission, was a spectacular failure.

But the kitchen disaster taught him something.

There was a kind of culinary alchemy in what his grandparents did, a finesse impossible to capture simply by listing ingredients and quantities.

“There’s some finesse and nuance here that these grandparents have that we just don’t,” he says with a laugh.

That nuance became central to the philosophy behind anana.

Why the “Nonna” matters

At the heart of anana is the nonna -- the Italian word for grandmother.

The choice is deliberate. For Mefalopulos, the nonna represents something much bigger than a family elder. She embodies generations of accumulated knowledge, intuition and experience in the kitchen.

In a digital food culture dominated by influencers, professional chefs and picture-perfect dishes, anana deliberately looks elsewhere.

To the nonna.

The grandmother.

The home cook.

The person who has been making the same dish for decades without ever needing to consult a recipe card.

“Grandparents all over the world… have just done it the longest. They’ve withstood the test of time,” Mefalopulos says.

There is something quietly powerful about that idea.

Culinary mastery does not necessarily come with a certificate, a restaurant kitchen or years of formal training. Sometimes, it comes from making the same dish hundreds of times until the hands simply know what to do.

Grandparents, Mefalopulos argues, challenge the assumption that great cooking must be formally taught.

They cook by memory. By instinct. By feel.

And anana wants to capture that knowledge before it slips away.

Rather than extracting recipes from their cultural surroundings and reducing them to lists of ingredients and instructions, the platform films cooks in their own homes, allowing their kitchens, voices, habits and surroundings to become part of the story.

The result is something between a cooking platform, cultural archive and family album.

Because the dish is only half the story.

The person who makes it is the other half.

From Italy to Kuwait and beyond

Although anana’s roots are Italian, its ambitions are anything but provincial.

The same challenge exists across the Middle East, where recipes have long traveled from one generation to another by word of mouth. In Kuwait, dishes such as machboos, mutabbaq and zubaidi can change subtly and sometimes dramatically from one household to the next.

One family may use a particular blend of spices. Another may insist on a different cooking method. A grandmother may add something that does not appear in any cookbook but somehow makes the dish taste unmistakably like home.

There may be no single authoritative version.

And according to Mefalopulos, that is precisely the point.

“There is no such thing as a correct recipe,” he says. “There’s respective iterations of the recipe.”

For anana, those differences are not imperfections to be corrected. They are fingerprints.

One grandmother may add an ingredient another would never consider. One family may cook a dish longer, use a different spice or prepare it for an entirely different occasion.

Those divergences are not culinary errors. They are the imprint of geography, memory, family and time.

“That nuance and that difference,” Mefalopulos says, is exactly what anana wants to highlight.

The idea feels particularly at home in Kuwait, where cultures and cuisines coexist within the same neighborhoods, workplaces and families.

Mefalopulos imagines a platform where a Kuwaiti grandmother, a Filipino grandmother and an Indian grandmother can stand side by side, figuratively and literally, sharing the dishes that shaped their families.

It is a portrait of food culture as it actually exists: layered, evolving and richly textured.

Choosing authenticity over clicks

The internet is awash with free recipes. Many are supported by advertising, sponsored content or affiliate links.

anana chose another road.

From the beginning, Mefalopulos says, the team decided against offering a free version because it wanted to protect the experience and the integrity of the brand.

“We really didn’t want to monetize off of ads and affiliate marketing that slowly over time can erode a brand,” he explains.

The subscription model also serves another purpose: ensuring that the grandparents who contribute their knowledge are compensated.

That decision reflects one of anana’s central principles. If a family recipe represents years sometimes an entire lifetime of knowledge, the person carrying that knowledge should not be treated merely as content.

They are the source.

They are the storyteller.

They are part of the heritage being preserved.

It is an unusual proposition in an online world where people routinely give away their knowledge in exchange for views, likes and exposure.

anana instead places a monetary value on something that has traditionally been treated as priceless: inherited knowledge.

The long-term ambition is equally substantial which is to expand into more than 20 countries in the years to come without allowing scale to flatten the stories that made the platform meaningful in the first place.

When Nonna doesn’t measure

Traditional digital recipes often demand precision: grams, calories, macros, cooking temperatures and exact timings.

Heritage cooking has never been quite so obedient.

A pinch becomes a handful. A little becomes “until it looks right.” Cooking time becomes “until it smells ready.”

For generations, this instinctive approach has been part of the charm of home cooking. A grandmother does not necessarily need to know whether she has added 4 or 5 grams of an ingredient. She knows when the dish tastes right.

anana embraces that wonderfully imprecise language.

Its nutritional labels carry a cheeky reminder of the philosophy: “Nonna doesn’t measure, so neither do we.”

Beneath the humor is a serious idea.

Cooking is not always a mathematical exercise. Sometimes knowledge resides in the senses: the sound of onions sizzling, the smell of garlic changing color, the texture of dough beneath the fingertips, or that elusive moment when a sauce has finally reached the right consistency.

These are things a spreadsheet cannot teach.

And they are precisely the details that can disappear when traditional cooking is reduced to a sterile list of instructions.

More than a meal

Mefalopulos does not want anana users to leave with only a successful dinner.

Each dish is accompanied by a short historical account known as “recipe roots,” giving context to where the food came from and why it matters.

That transforms a recipe into a doorway.

Behind a plate of food might be a migration, a marriage, a childhood, a lost village, a religious celebration or a family that carried its traditions across borders.

A dish may tell the story of a grandmother who learned to cook from her own mother. Another may reveal how a family adapted an old recipe after moving to another country. Yet another may preserve a technique that exists nowhere outside a particular household.

Food becomes a vessel for memory.

And perhaps that is the larger ambition of anana: to remind people that food is rarely just food.

It is history that can be tasted.

It is culture served at the table.

It is memory made tangible.

The questions we forget to ask

For younger generations worried that their own family traditions may vanish, Mefalopulos offers advice that requires neither an app nor a subscription.

Sit with your grandparents.

Ask questions.

Listen.

Write the recipes down.

Most importantly, let them talk.

“Give them the opportunity to talk, write down the recipe so that they don’t disappear, and ask them the questions that maybe you never have,” he says.

There is something almost deceptively simple about the advice.

In an age of smartphones, cloud storage and endless digital archives, preserving a family recipe may begin with something far more old-fashioned: sitting across from someone you love and asking, “How did you make this?”

The answer might be a recipe.

It might also be a story.

It might lead to a memory about a wedding, a childhood home, a difficult journey, a family celebration or someone who is no longer around to tell it themselves.

And that, perhaps, is what anana ultimately hopes to preserve.

Not just the instructions for making a dish, but the human history simmering behind it.

Because recipes can be copied.

Techniques can be taught.

Ingredients can be replaced.

But a grandmother’s voice, the rhythm of her hands and the story behind the food she made for her family are far harder to recreate.

“Some of the most beautiful conversations exist in the simplest questions,” Mefalopulos says.

Sometimes, all it takes to keep a piece of heritage alive is to ask before it is too late.

By Marlon Aquino Malinao

Arab Times - Managing Editor