Loud chatter blends with the sound of champagne fizz as bottles are opened and glasses are filled. Steak sizzles in the background, filling the room with its rich aroma. This is not a restaurant. This is a typical dinner party hosted by Maximo Mander ’26 at his Collegetown apartment.
Mander’s dinners with different friends and guests, where he cooks and presents elaborate dishes, have joined his recipe videos on his Instagram and TikTok accounts, where he has amassed over 150,000 followers.
Mander’s most viral Instagram videos have gained millions of views.
One of his videos that shares a montage from a dinner party and features Mander preparing the dinner has amassed over 23 million views. Views on his how-to recipe videos have also reached the millions, with some boasting upwards of 7 million views.
After visiting Sardinia, an island off the coast of Italy, Mander wanted to replicate a Sardinian lobster dish at his apartment in Collegetown. This led to one of his first viral videos.
“I said to my friends, ‘You know what? Let's film [the cooking process],’” he said. “And the video did really well.”
Travel has heavily influenced Mander’s cooking interests. Mander said his inspiration for cooking came from his experiences traveling across six continents.
“With every new culture comes a new type of food, and I was able to visit a lot of high-end, really good places with amazing food and amazing service,” Mander said.
In his sophomore summer, Mander worked at Arnolfo, a Michelin star restaurant in Tuscany, where he learned to make fresh pasta.
The pasta-making process is extremely particular, Mander explained. For instance, fresh pasta should be cooked in two minutes — no more, no less — ensuring that the pasta maintains its starch and the sauce clings to the pasta, Mander said.
Learning to make pasta in Tuscany sparked Mander’s business idea, he said.
“‘What if I could [make pasta] in a fast, casual way, kind of like Shake Shack burgers?’” Mander had asked himself. “There's not a place for pasta that does that in the U.S.”
In March 2025, Mander started Pronti Pasta, a pop-up, casual pasta catering business. Partnering with restaurants, bars and cafes in cities like New York City and Miami, Mander curates several pasta dishes with a variety of sauces.
He hosted the business’ first event at the Tres Leches bar in Collegetown early in March 2025, according to an Instagram post from the business’ account. During the event, he served homemade fresh rigatoni with two sauces and tiramisu.
“I have to spend like eight hours a night before [an event] cutting the pasta,” Mander said. “So it has to be 100% fresh, and then we pair it with pesto sauce, Comodoro sauce, Bolognese and truffle sauce.”
Currently, Mander only hosts dinner parties and pasta events, but he hopes to open a restaurant after he graduates from Cornell this spring, he said.
“I want to stop doing it monthly and [start] doing it like every day,” Mander said, adding that he wanted to “get a bar or a place in Miami that would allow me to do this for like three or four months to test it out and see how it goes.”
Mander’s social media presence, which comprises Cornell students, exchange students and more, contributed to his success, he said. He added that he hopes his online reach will help with his future restaurant goals.
“I did think that becoming a food influencer would be a good way for my restaurants to be packed,” Mander said.
However, Mander’s dinner parties began long before his social media fame. The parties have always served as casual gatherings for Mander and his friends.
At times, unfamiliar people ask to be invited to his dinners, he said, and he believes they are just trying to be a part of the experiences they observed through social media.
“The hardest thing about social media is there's a bit of superficiality to it,” Mander said. “You lose that authenticity.”
Still, Mander believes that genuine interactions contribute to a meaningful shared experience, something he aims to curate at both his dinners and events.
“What people remember the most is the way you made them feel [at] the dinner party and the fact that you're creating a memory,” Mander said.
Elizabeth Chow is a member of the Class of 2029 in the Brooks School of Public Policy. She is a contributor for the News department and can be reached at ec977@cornell.edu.
