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.)
