WHEAT RIDGE • Last year at Grammy’s Goodies, there was a bit of a crisis.
“The ravioli machine broke,” says Joeylyn Corder, the great-granddaughter of the woman the restaurant honors. The ravioli machine was from the kitchen of that woman, the late Lucille Acierno.
“It breaks, and we’re trying to find a part for this, like, 1930s tool,” Joeylyn continues. “We’re trying to find a part, trying to be mechanics ourselves. So we’re out of ravioli for, like, two months.”
The loyal customers of Grammy’s Goodies protested: Couldn’t the family get a new press? Couldn’t they get store-bought ravioli?
No, and no. Grammy’s machine was the only way.
“We have to fix the machine,” Joeylyn says. They finally did, “and the phones were ringing off the hook. We were making raviolis around the clock.”
There is much, much more in demand at Grammy’s Goodies.
Huge hunks of Sicilian pizza. Huge hunks of sausage and Grammy’s homemade meatballs packed in huge, homemade “bread blankies” (said to be the best meat cannolis this side of Denver).
Lucille Acierno also went big on chicken Parm. It is among pastas perfected by her “Sunday sauce” that has carried on for generations, going back to her Italian father immigrating to northern Colorado’s coal fields in the early 1900s.
The lasagna is another favorite. Guy Fieri ordered it for a 2020 episode of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” that broadened the appeal of Grammy’s Goodies beyond the neighborhood.
Joeylyn remembers the show host asking her mother, Vickie, how many meatballs went into the lasagna.
“She’s panicking, because she doesn’t know the number,” Joeylyn says.
Because the lasagna recipe, like all recipes here, don’t entail numbers as much as they entail memories and feelings. Memories and feelings from a grandmother’s kitchen — Lucille’s kitchen, where Vickie grew up.
“I don’t make a pot of sauce without her words ringing in my ears,” Vickie says.
The words: “Father, son and Holy Spirit.” That’s what her grandmother uttered over the simmering sauce, adding ingredients accordingly in three.
In the early morning silence of the restaurant, Joeylyn can be heard praying Hail Marys. She’ll be praying Hail Marys and pressing the traditional cookie her great-grandmother made best, the pizzelle. The time it took to pray Hail Mary was the time it took to press the wafflelike pizzelle into a perfect golden brown, Joeylyn learned as a little girl.
At Grammy’s Goodies, the dessert case and shelves are filled with rotating pies, cakes and cookies. Fieri went with a giant cream puff, one of the mainstays here. The pizzelle is another — one of Joeylyn’s jobs.
“And I’m very grateful it’s my job, because it reminds me so much of my grandma,” she says. She pauses in thought. “I’m gonna get choked up talking about it.”
Here where the portions are big as the family’s heart, the tears come easy. They come now to George, Joeylyn’s brother leading the kitchen.
“I feel her here,” George says of his great-grandmother. “Every once in a while, you walk in and it smells just like her house on a Sunday.”
Growing up, Sundays were for steak and pasta. That’s listed under “Grammy’s Favorites” on the menu, which the family feels awkward calling a menu. “It’s just what we cook at home,” Vickie says.
It’s what she learned to cook from Grammy and what she watches her adult kids cook now. She watches George and Joeylyn, and it’s easy to cry.
But there’s no time for crying with her grandkids running around. George’s little ones hang out in the extension of the restaurant that looks like a built-in day care, with toys scattered around and a TV playing cartoons.
The family built this space after “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” — more dining space, they figured, in anticipation of new waves of customers exceeding the few tables here. “Then this one started having babies,” Vickie says, pointing to George.
And so the extra dining room would be for the kids, not customers. And this would be the realization of a dream for Vickie. It was never about more business.
“I always wanted a way for the family to just be together, and we didn’t have to kiss each other goodbye to go to work,” she says. “If it was a restaurant or digging holes, if we could just be together, I’m happy.”
Now her husband, Jeff, stays right here at Grammy’s Goodies. He’s still working hard as ever in retirement age, a salesman pecking away at his laptop in the grandkids’ room, playing with them during breaks.
“It makes me feel so good,” Joeylyn says. “I would never say he was an absent father, but he never really got to play with George and I much. He was working so George and I could have everything we wanted.”
Jeff drove trucks and hauled dirt day and night while Vickie stayed home with the infants. As George and Joeylyn grew, Vickie waited tables at a restaurant. The kids would stay back with Grammy, eating lots of pizzelle.
Their parents wanted for them a college education that they never had. But how to afford it?
“We just wanted to make some extra money,” Jeff says, “so we started doing the event business.”
In 2005, they started selling those traditional cookies at an Italian festival. They sold out the first day. They baked all night, Grammy and Vickie and the kids in their little kitchen, and sold out again the second day.
They thought of more eye-catching goodies — “chocolate chip cookies bigger than CDs, Rice Krispies Treats that looked like house bricks,” George says of goodies still sold today. And then the pizza, huge hunks cooked in an oven that Jeff hauled around to more and more events.
“Every year we added 10 more feet (of vendor space), then 10 more feet, then 10 more feet,” Joeylyn says.
The college fund grew. George and Joeylyn went off to Colorado State University, while their parents found a brick-and-mortar home for Grammy’s Goodies.
This was 2015. Grammy was around to see the restaurant open.
“She looked at the sign and said, ‘You put my name up in lights,’” Vickie says. “That was March 18. She passed away in my arms April 18.”
The thought brings tears to George’s eyes. “She was really proud,” he says.
So was he. So was his sister. And so after college, of course they came right back to Grammy’s Goodies.
Their mom had mixed emotions. “We tried to get the kids an education,” Vickie says beside George, “and he’s back here working harder than me and his dad ever did.”
George smiles and shrugs. “There have been challenges and hard times, but it doesn’t feel that way, because we’re all here together. It’s like being home.”
Like being home, “nothing fancy,” Vickie says of the food. Like at home, “we might be yelling,” she says. Then they’ll be hugging. They’ll be cooking and praying Hail Mary and adding ingredients in threes, crying happy tears for Grammy.
And the kids will be running around. “A Power Wheel might run into the kitchen,” George says.
And there’s his boy, little George, the next generation with a twinkle in his eye, a familiar cookie in his hand.
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