Gus Constantellis and his father, John Constantellis, share keftedakia in John's kitchen in Brooklyn. (Photos by Lisa Corson for The Washington Post)
It all started on TikTok in late 2020, when stand-up comedian Gus Constantellis donned a blond pageboy wig and a heavy accent to demonstrate how a Greek mom makes tzatziki, the garlicky cucumber-and-yogurt sauce that is a staple accompaniment in traditional Mediterranean meals.
Soon enough, he put his real Greek mom, Julia, in front of the camera, too. In a 2021 video, Julia leans wearily against her kitchen stove, smoking a cigarette down to the filter. He asks her in Greek about what foods she’d made for Christmas, then translates her response: “I made a cheese pie, a lamb roast, a stuffed turkey … carbonara, salads, tzatziki, tirokafteri, fresh bread, desserts. What didn’t I make?” Yet, even as she looks exhausted, she turns to the camera and says with a shrug, “That’s how it is, my child. Should you leave hungry?”
The video garnered hundreds of comments from Gus’s 240,000 followers, many identifying as the children or grandchildren of immigrants who found a comforting — and comical — familiarity in Julia’s demeanor: gruff but caring, cynical but supportive, unhealthy in her own behaviors but demanding better from others. Growing up in poverty in a rural village in western Greece as the youngest of seven, Julia had learned to cook for a crowd from a young age, and continued to cook that way the rest of her life, raising a brood of three boys alongside her husband, John, in Brooklyn.
Gus, now 32, found comic inspiration growing up as a first-generation American, creating a Greek Mom character for videos such as “If Greek Mom Was A Disney Princess” and “Greek Moms When They Visit.” The TikToks quickly gained traction during the first year of the pandemic, but including his real-life muse was a game changer.
“At first, she thought he was making fun,” says John, Gus’s father, who fell in love with Julia when they were teenagers working in a clothing factory in Athens in the 1970s, “but it wasn’t true. The last couple of years she really got into it, and people even started to recognize her and would ask if they could take a picture with her.”
Gus Constantellis makes his mother's keftedakia recipe. (Lisa Corson for The Washington Post)
Constantellis forms the meatballs. (Lisa Corson for The Washington Post)
The meatballs await frying. (Lisa Corson for The Washington Post)
Get the recipe: Keftedakia (Greek-Style Meatballs)
Adds Gus: “She realized that she could say what she wanted to say, and I think that was freeing.” After 39 years of living in the United States — the last four as a naturalized citizen — and without ever knowing how to speak English, she had found a way to communicate and connect on her own terms.
The videos often focused on Julia’s exceptional cooking skills, as she deftly prepared such classic Greek dishes as koulourakia (butter cookies) and spanakorizo (spinach rice), but it was her natural comic timing and blunt delivery, coupled with Gus’s translation and infectious off-camera giggles, that drew an audience. “She started to really fine-tune her jokes. There was never a second take with her,” Gus says. “She was a one-take wonder, and there was a magic to that.” He suggested that they work on a cookbook together; she was enthusiastic about the idea, and maybe even touched that the recipes that she had fed her family, day in and day out, since her girlhood in Kapeleto, had enough value to be recorded and shared with a wider audience.
Gus had begun learning some of his mother’s recipes soon after moving to Los Angeles in 2014 to work as a television writer. “There wasn’t a large Greek community out there,” says Gus, “and I did really miss her cooking. So I’d call her to get her recipes, and it was always really funny because she’d say things like, ‘You know that coffee cup I have, the one with that picture on it? That’s how much flour you need.’ So I was always trying to figure out how to measure ingredients, and it was a lot of trial and error.”
After returning to New York in 2018 to pursue a full-time career in stand-up, Gus had more opportunities to learn Julia’s kitchen wisdom in person, adding to his own skills — something that was clearly important to her, as she often asserted in her son’s videos that he and his brothers needed to learn her recipes before she died. It was gallows humor, to be sure, yet utterly familiar to anyone who has grown up as part of an immigrant diaspora. As someone commented on one of the videos, “It’s not a Greek mom recipe if she doesn’t remind you of human mortality.”
Gus looks at photos of his mother, Julia Constantellis, with his dad. (Lisa Corson for The Washington Post)
A photograph of Julia rests on a vase in John's dining room. (Lisa Corson for The Washington Post)
The reality hit sooner than expected when Julia suffered a stroke due to a brain aneurysm and went into a coma during a family vacation in Greece in August 2023; Gus had been with his parents in Crete a few days earlier and was scheduled to meet up with them in Athens for the flight back to the United States.
Four days later, at age 65, she was gone. And four days after that, in a video that racked up more than 1 million views, Gus stood in his kitchen making keftedakia, the meatballs that were a Constantellis family favorite. There’s a rawness to his introduction to the video, as he looks into the camera and says, “So, my mom died four days ago, but, yesterday, the supermarket ran out of frozen meatballs, and I realized” — as he emphasizes each following word — “my mom taught me how to make meatballs.” During the video, he talks about the cookbook that he had imagined writing with his mom and jokes about how she would critique his keftedakia efforts in the afterlife.
A few months later, in December 2023, Gus took to social media again, this time to create a channel on Instagram called “Greek Mom Cookbook,” looking to crowdsource help in decoding his mother’s sparsely written directions for such recipes as tsoureki, a traditional braided Easter bread; and soutzoukakia, cumin-spiced oblong meatballs baked in tomato sauce.
“I had 7,000 followers in two hours,” he says, with the channel eventually numbering more than 10,000 subscribers. “I wanted to do this book while she was still alive; I thought we would have a YouTube channel where we’d be cooking the recipes and we’d have a book tour together. After she died, it became about preserving the recipes for my niece and nephew.”
Julia’s recipes were celebrated in her extended family, where she was widely acknowledged as the superior cook and fiercely determined to carry on their ancestral food culture for future generations. Sitting in the Manhattan tailor shop owned by John and Gus’s brother Mario, the men reminisce fondly about Julia’s dishes, including grilled octopus and lentil soup, and they chuckle over how she would cook anywhere, any time. “She would literally put potatoes from her own house in her Louis Vuitton bag and then pull them out at my brother Dimitri’s house and fry up potatoes for her grandchildren,” Gus says. Mario, ever the older brother, adds, “She started that because making fried potatoes was the only way she could get you to eat food you didn’t like.”
Keftedakia, made from Julia Constantellis's recipe. (Lisa Corson for The Washington Post)
Gus and John. (Lisa Corson for The Washington Post)
The Instagram crowdsourcing helped Gus nail down methods and ingredients, along with help from an aunt and his brothers. The 75 recipes are accompanied by stories about Julia that are by turn funny, tender, tinged with grief, yet forward-looking. A novice to the cookbook world, Gus found himself being courted by literary agents, quickly leading to a book deal that will preserve his mother’s recipes in print. He imagines a QR code on each page of the book, scheduled to publish in 2026, that would connect to one of his videos, saying, “I’m not a chef, I’m a content creator — but my audience is young and they want to learn how to cook.”
Ultimately, the videos and the forthcoming book serve, in some sense, to keep Julia alive, her resilience and determination translated to platters filled with roast lamb and kolokithokeftedes (zucchini fritters), in frosty cups of a homemade version of her favorite caramel frappuccino, in tables filled with people eating her creations with deep appreciation.
“I built a shrine to my mother on social media,” Gus says. “When she died, that shrine became a temple. I feel good about doing this, but it will never replace my mom.”