Our Story
As featured in the Sunday Omaha World-Herald · March 2015
Our family story starts with 1,100 meatballs.
It's all true — it even made the front page. On March 1, 2015, the Sunday Omaha World-Herald ran a column by Erin Grace under a headline we'll never live down: “Competitive siblings on a roll.” For years, our family couldn't agree on whose meatballs were best. So we settled it the only proper way — with a party.
We called it the Ferrara Family Meatball Match, and we held it at our beloved Gorat's Steak House in Omaha. Ten of the eleven Ferrara siblings competed — nine sisters and two brothers — each defending their own version of the family recipe. Between them they rolled about 1,100 meatballs, and guests judged them on a scale that topped out at “that's amore.” The winner took home a chef's hat and a lifetime of bragging rights.
[ Family photos go here ]
The newspaper clipping, the meatball ball, and the family — add your images in this spot.
But the story really starts a generation earlier, in my grandmother Rose's kitchen. As the World-Herald put it: “Into the bowl goes love.” It was love that baked the homemade Italian bread our family carried to South Omaha Catholic school lunches. Love that grew the fat tomatoes in my grandfather's garden. Love that has sustained generations of Ferraras — and it's all written down in our family cookbook, Ferrara Family Favorites.
My mom, Mary Jo, still makes her meatballs the same way: coffee on, grandbaby down for a nap, bread dough rising — then ground chuck, crushed crackers, eggs, cheese, and a ritual hardwired into her Italian DNA. Into the bowl goes love.
At the meatball ball, my cousins emceed the whole beautiful circus and wrote a song for the occasion: “Meatballs Are Love.” Silly, joyful, and completely true — because it was never really about who won. “Pasta is Love” is our riff on that song: a whole little brand built on the same idea. That food is how we say I love you. That the table is where life actually happens. And that there's no substitute for the real thing, made with love — the same two words my grandmother wrote across her handwritten bread recipe: No Substitutes.
In Italy, they don't ask what you do for a living. They ask what makes you happy. For us, the answer has always been simple: good food, good people, a full plate shared with the ones you'd do anything for.
Every design we make carries an uplifting message — never anything mean-spirited. Just joy, welcome, and belonging. And the table keeps growing: on our Happy Wall, people everywhere share what makes them happy, and some of those words become our next designs.
No substitute for joy. Pull up a chair — everyone's welcome at this table.