The sauce will spill.
Celebrity chef Rocco Dispirito and his siblings are at war over their mother’s estate.
Dispirito says he was mom Nicolina’s sole caretaker for years, racking up more than $1 million in expenses the relatively meager estate now owes him, according to court papers.
Nicolina Dispirito, 87, was a fixture on Dispirito’s 2003 reality show “The Restaurant,” about the now defunct Rocco’s on 22nd, where she made hundreds of meatballs a day.
The mom would often walk red carpets with her TV-star son, one of three kids she raised in Queens and Long Island.
After her 2013 death, Rocco Dispirito, 50, was named executor of Nicolina’s estate, which includes a small Brooklyn apartment building on Pacific Street in East New York.
She left Rocco half of her estate, and her other two kids 25 percent each. The three siblings were to split her personal belongings equally.
But Rocco wants more — saying he spent more than a million dollars on Nicolina’s care in her final years that she agreed to repay.
But his brother Michael, 54, and sister Maria, 62, counter in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court papers that Rocco’s attempts to put their mother’s affairs in order were half-baked.
Rocco threw their mom’s possessions into storage on Long Island in 2012 and left them there, and is now ignoring the fees, the siblings charge.
“There is an imminent risk of all of the personal property that belongs in the estate of Nicolina Dispirito will be sold just to pay for the outstanding storage bills,” they gripe.
The personal effects aren’t even worth the more than $54,000 Rocco paid to keep them stored, Michael and Maria say. The storage fees are now more than $15,000 in arrears.
They want Rocco to sell Nicolina’s four-story building, worth approximately $1 million, and finally resolve their mom’s affairs.
But Rocco said in his own court papers that he did plenty for his mom and should be repaid.
He was their mom’s “major, if not the only, source of financial support” in the decade before she died, Rocco insists, paying for her assisted living facility and all her needs to the tune of $28,000 a month.
Nicolina “felt obligated” to repay Rocco, and signed an agreement to refund him the $1.14 million he spent on her from the proceeds of her estate, which is worth less than $1.5 million, he claims in court papers.
There’s no word on how the siblings might split their mom’s famed meatball recipe.