‘Meals by Cugine’: The Staten Island food influencer blowing up TikTok

Apr 06, 2022 1728

BY: Kirsten Fleming

He’s the cuisine cugine. Meet Danny Mondello, the Rossville, Staten Island, native behind the wildly popular TikTok account “Meals_by_cug.” Cug is short for cugine, which means “cousin” in Italian, but is also a colloquial term used to describe an Italian-American. “When I made this page, it was a persona. Cug isn’t Danny,” Mondello, 24, told The Post.

Mondello’s hyperbolic alter ego, which is distinctly outer-borough, has charmed a large swath of the internet. He boasts 1.6 million TikTok followers and nearly half a million on Instagram, all tuning in for his food reviews, which feature Italian-American slang, swigs of Diet Coke, clever one-liners and raunchy sister jokes delivered in his deep voice that sounds like it’s been simmering in Sunday sauce for eight hours. (His accent, by the way, is very real.)

Read more

SOURCE: https://nypost.com/

You may be interested