Like any good Italian mom, Anna Prezio loves to cook for her three kids—and, as of late, for her hundreds of thousands of social media followers. But today she’s cooking for one follower in particular: me.
Potato gnocchi with red sauce, beef meatballs, and spicy peppers are on the menu. It’s all homemade, mostly with ingredients grown at her house in inland North San Diego County. I nibble on the appetizers—a hot plate of prosciutto stuffed pizza and freshly baked biscotti—as I watch the 5-foot nothing, 73-year-old, bespectacled Prezio dart from one corner of her kitchen to the next.
It’s clear this is her domain. With Frank Sinatra crooning in the background, Prezio roams the kitchen like Fernando TatÍs patrols right field, deftly moving back and forth between the stove, the cutting board, and the fridge.
“I like to have two or three things going at the same time,” she says. “I could stay in the kitchen night and day and always find something to do. Always.”
That’s easy to see. Prezio—who was born in Roggiano Gravina in southern Italy and moved to Toronto as a teenager in the ’60s, before she and her husband, Gigi, followed their adult kids to SD about 10 years ago—makes sure to explain the key to good gnocchi: You have to push tiny holes into each one and roll them on a grooved board to allow for maximum sauce pickup.
Before my eyes, she whips up hundreds of gnocchi in the span of a half hour. (That’s not even close to her personal record—she says she once made 972 in a single day.)
Once the gnocchi is plated, she hands me a fork to try my first bite.
“It’s good?” she asks, anxiously leaning forward.
Yes, it’s good. Actually, it’s great. In fact, I tell her, with all due respect to my late grandmother, it’s the best Italian food I’ve ever had. And I mean it. If potato angels existed, these gnocchi would be the fluffy pillows where they laid their heads.
With that, the concern in her brown eyes washes away. She flashes a massive smile and claps her hands.
Recipes like this, coupled with her effervescent Italian nonna vibe, have propelled Prezio to social media fame. On Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where she’s known as @thatladyanna, she’s racked up more than 700,000 combined followers since last November, when she shared her first cooking video.
And it didn’t take long for Prezio to get used to working with her “producer”—her son, Reno, a hairstylist based in North Park.
While Prezio grabs more Parmesan for the table, Reno tells me their operation is a simple one: Each weekend, he comes over to visit his parents, and while he’s here, he films his mom cooking on his iPhone. No fancy cameras, no extra lights, no input from some “creative” at a social media agency.
Then, he edits the clips together on Instagram—something he was already used to doing for his hair account—before sharing to her accounts, complete with a full recipe breakdown. Each visit garners him two or three videos to post during the week.
“The hardest part is keeping up with her. Sometimes she’ll do something [in the kitchen] before I film it,” Reno says, drawing another laugh from his mom.
Neither one of them expected to hit it big on social media. They posted their first video on a whim, Reno says, after he recorded his mom cooking for one of his clients. He figured an Instagram account full of videos of her dishes would be “a good visual recipe book for me that I can go back and watch 30 years from now,” he says.
It turned out to be much more than that. Prezio’s recipes built up decent traction in the first few months, nabbing tens of thousands of views, but her following exploded in June. That was when @chefreactions, a popular Instagram and TikTok account with millions of followers, reviewed Prezio’s meatballs.
“One morning, I woke up and saw that he started following her,” Reno recalls. “And I got really excited—but then I got really worried, because he talks smack on bad recipes. I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to talk about my mom!’ Thirty minutes later, he dropped the video, and he loved it, just praising her.”
“Look at this absolute angel of a lady,” @chefreactions said in his review. “Making meatballs [with] perfect portion control. Like I could eat this every Sunday and not complain.”
“From there, it really took off,” Reno adds. Now, Prezio’s videos routinely draw millions of eyes. In July, her eggplant parmigiana recipe was viewed 6.7 million times on Instagram, and earlier this month, her saltimbocca veal dish received 14 million views in its first week.
Anna Prezio in her kitchen, where she films enchanting Italian cooking videos for hundreds of thousands of followers.
Her ballooning social media following now includes an eclectic mix of celebrity fans waiting to check out her latest dish. Prezio is especially tickled knowing chef Emeril Lagasse, who she loved watching on Food Network, has seen her posts.
“I used to watch him, and now he watches me,” Prezio says, getting choked up for a moment.
But her recent success hasn’t gone to her head. When I tell her she’s now a social media star, Prezio chuckles and quickly brushes off the assertion.
“I don’t think I’m a star. That’s a big word,” she says. “This really surprised me a lot, because when we started, we didn’t do it to become this. I had no clue whatsoever.”
Reno and Prezio have recently started to monetize her account—he shows me she pulled in about $500 from YouTube in August—but they both view this more as a labor of love. As I help myself to my third serving of gnocchi and meatballs, Reno says they’d like to do a pop-up restaurant in San Diego soon, if only to have more people try Prezio’s recipes out. She loves the idea, because it’ll be an opportunity to break her gnocchi record of 972.
When I excuse myself to leave, my belly is bulging well past my belt, and I have only one question left for Prezio: After all this, are you going to take a day off from the kitchen tomorrow?
“For what?” she asks. “I love to cook!”
