We typed «Italian cooking» —not her name— and Chef Roberta came out first, with 80 million views from San José

This started as a test of the search engine and ended as a recommendation. We typed «cocina italiana» —Italian cooking— into the qCRew search box, with no filters and no idea who we expected, and the first result was Chef Roberta with 233 videos. Then we tried «pasta recipes», «Roman pizza» and «fresh pasta». She came out first in all four.

And when we went to find out who she was, it turned out she was not unknown at all. Not remotely.

Who Chef Roberta is

Her name is Roberta Cipri, she was born in Rome, and she has lived in Costa Rica since 2021. La Nación told her story in February 2025: she moved in the middle of the pandemic, worn down by an Italy where «se paga mucho impuesto y es bastante complicado todo, no funciona nada» — you pay a lot of tax and everything is complicated, nothing works. About Costa Rica she says the opposite, and without dressing it up: «here it is very expensive, Costa Rica is very expensive, but everything works».

In November 2024 she opened Aroma Roma, across from UCIMED in La Sabana, San José, and that kitchen is where she films. The Italian-Costa Rican Chamber of Industry and Commerce gave the restaurant its Sello de Calidad Italiana, the seal the chamber uses to mark the places that represent real Italian cooking in the country.

The numbers on her YouTube channel, read on 9 September 2026: 301 thousand subscribers, 581 videos and 80 million views. She opened the channel on 11 January 2024. That is a little over two and a half years to get there.

On TikTok the climb is steeper still. The La Nación piece, from February 2025, counted 620 thousand followers there and 200 thousand on Instagram. Today HypeAuditor's list of the largest Costa Rican TikTok accounts puts her at 2 million. More than triple in nineteen months.

And one detail we liked: the person running her social accounts is her son, Mattia Alimonti, 21. A woman cooking and a young man editing. That is the whole company.

What she uploads are not recipes, they are corrections

Her most watched video runs 45 seconds and is called «PIZZA PEPPERONI en ITALIA NO EXISTE» — pepperoni pizza does not exist in Italy: 6.5 million views. The second, «La PIZZA se CORTA con TIJERAS», pizza is cut with scissors, is past 3.7 million. The third is the original Alfredo sauce recipe, at 3.4 million.

Look at the pattern, because it explains the whole channel. She is not teaching people to cook: she is correcting them. She takes something half the world assumes is Italian —the pepperoni, the wheel cutter, the cream in an Alfredo— and explains in under a minute why it is not, without scolding anyone and without a trace of superiority.

The real substance, though, is in the long videos. Almost everything she uploads is a reel, and that is what made her big; where she really opens up is in the full-length ones: homemade bread with no sourdough starter in four hours, entire bread-making courses, lasagne with ragù alla bolognese step by step. The short is the hook; the class is the channel.

And it is alive right now, not an archive

This matters more than it sounds, because a directory that recommends dead channels is worth nothing.

The cover image on this article comes from a video she published on 7 September 2026, two days before we wrote this: creamy pasta e patate with no cream, nine minutes long. The week before that she had uploaded five chapters of a focaccia course. The week before that, five more on pizza in teglia.

This is not a channel that hit once. It is a channel publishing this week.

Who has already had her on camera

In December 2024 Diego Garro —who we already wrote about when he released his World Cup song— published «COCINÉ 24 HORAS EN UN RESTAURANTE ITALIANO», 24 hours cooking in an Italian restaurant: 21 minutes inside Aroma Roma, with her teaching him Roman pizza alla pala and correcting his pronunciation of the ingredients. It is at 73 thousand views.

It is the only crossover we found between Chef Roberta and another Costa Rican creator, and it was made by someone who at the time had not yet released the song that took him to the World Cup.

And one aside while we are here, with all the opinion that implies: Los Gordos Monchies —the food show by Toledo and DjP, who we wrote about when we reviewed Los Gordos Podcast— flew all the way to Italy in early 2026 to watch buffalo mozzarella being made, and still has not sat down with the Roman chef making pizza alla pala right here in La Sabana. Not a complaint: they film what they want with whoever they want, which is exactly why they are good. It is simply the episode we would like to watch.

Why this article sits in a directory and not in a list of recommendations

Here is the point of everything above, and it is an uncomfortable one to make.

Chef Roberta is not our discovery. La Nación profiled her a year and a half ago. She has 2 million followers on TikTok. Plenty of the people reading this already watch her every week, and some have probably eaten at her restaurant.

What did not exist was a place where you could type «Italian cooking» and find her.

That is the difference, and it is the whole difference. Hearing about someone depends on the algorithm showing them to you, on a friend forwarding a link, or on a large outlet running a story the day you happen to be reading. Searching for them depends on you. The first is luck; the second is a tool.

Of every food creator in the qCRew catalogue, Chef Roberta is today the largest: 2.3 million followers between TikTok and YouTube, and 78 million views on the videos we have of hers. She was there from day one. All that was missing was somebody to ask.

And there is a line of hers, said about food and not about software, that sums the whole problem up better than anything we wrote.

Real Italian food is very hard to look for in any country.

Roberta Cipri to La Nación, February 2025

To look for. That was the verb.