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If you have been to Rouses, you have undoubtedly spotted the distinct, black-and-white Red Gravy label when walking down the pasta sauce aisle. What you may not know is that Red Gravy is a local sauce, made from a family recipe born in Sicily and passed down for generations. It was first introduced to Americans at Tony Mandina’s restaurant in Gretna. It has since become as famous as the restaurant itself. “We do not mess with that recipe,” says Kolette Mandina Ditta of Tony Mandina’s. “It has always been near and dear to our hearts, coming from my grandmother. It was born in Salaparuta, and we would never do anything to change it.” The story of Red Gravy is a lot like the story of the 37-year-old restaurant itself. When Tony Mandina was young, his father, a Sicilian, always said, “Son, as long as you spend your money on food, it’s OK.” The idea of opening a restaurant had always been in the back of Tony’s mind and, bolstered by those words from childhood, in 1982, he and his wife, Grace, went for it. What, after all, is a restaurant if not a grand investment in food? Today, the restaurant remains a Gretna fixture, with diners trav- eling from around the country to dine there. The sauce, at the heart of several Italian recipes the family brought from the Old Country, remains a key part of the restaurant’s success. Five years ago, Kolette Mandina Ditta hatched a plan to bring the sauce to an even wider audience. “It was always an idea in the back of my mind,” she says. “We’ve got to jar this stuff.” She began experimenting with the bottling process in May 2014. She started in the restaurant’s kitchen, went through the FDA approval process, learned the ins and outs of how to prepare it, plus how to get it on shelves and actually sell it. The sauce is made for stores the same way it is prepared in the restaurant: in small batches, cooked for five hours, continually tasted to make sure it reflects the perfect flavor profile handed down from Ditta’s grandmother. In the beginning, the red gravy wasn’t called Red Gravy. “Even when we would do our own menus at the restaurant, we would always try and put an elaborate name on it — marinara sauce or pasta pomodoro — and I don’t know why that was. ‘Red gravy’ just didn’t sound fancy enough.” She says she drove her husband crazy trying to come up with the name for the jarred sauce, until he said, exasperated, “Just call it red gravy, will you!” And it was a light-bulb moment for her. He was right; she should call it what it was. To stand out on store shelves, Mandina Ditta wanted a simple label to reflect the simple name. In professional printing, every additional color on a product adds to the price tag, and she wanted to be cost effective. A black and white label it was! And it represented the product perfectly: There is a simplicity to Red Gravy. It is not chunky sauce; it is smooth and sweet (but not overly sweet). It is perfectly seasoned to serve as is, but is also a nimble base for experimentation. Add a little cream

to make a tomato cream sauce. Add crushed red pepper and spices and make it a diavolo sauce. It’s perfect for Bloody Marys. Use it to make a lobster saffron. Make a roux, add the holy trin- ity — onion, bell pepper and celery — and finish with Red Gravy to make a Cajun Redfish Courtbouillon. The gravy is ready to go, right out of the bottle (you could open a jar and drink it right there in the Rouses checkout line, but please do not do this), making it an ideal canvas for any culinary creation that pops into your mind. In August 2014, the first jar of Red Gravy appeared on grocery store shelves. “I still cannot believe the chance that Rouses gave me,” Mandina Ditta says. “It says a lot about who they are. It was a local product, and Rouses is all about local. It was even to my surprise when they said ‘Yes, we’ll try it out.’ And now it does really, really well. I will never forget that they gave me that chance at the beginning.” In the years since its inception, Red Gravy has taken on a life of its own. When it outgrew the Tony Mandina’s restaurant kitchen, Mandina Ditta turned to a childhood friend to help prepare it on a larger scale. (But it is still made in small batches, still stirred and prepared by human hands.) Its success has driven business to the restaurant — people want to see the ways the sauce can be used in restaurant-quality dishes — and the success of the restaurant drives sales to Red Gravy. As for what’s next, Mandina Ditta says, “Stay tuned.” Her parents, Tony and Grace, recently celebrated their 52nd wedding anniver- sary. The Mandina family still travels regularly to Sicily. The Old World still has a lot of things left to teach the new. And as long as they spend money on food, it’s all OK.

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