Chef Nicole Russo
Beyond the Antipasto Salad: How it Captured TikTok’s Heart, Launching Nicole Russo's Homestead Kitchen and Garden to Fame
On July 4, 2025, Nicole Russo, 37, a chef and organic farmer in Gate City, Virginia, took to TikTok to recount a rather humiliating experience. She was turned away by the homeowners of a Fourth of July “gathering,” which she had been invited to by her son’s best friend’s mother, and where she brought an antipasto salad with tomatoes and vegetables from her garden and homemade fresh mozzarella cheese as a kind gesture, because she was relatively new to the area. Since that day, Russo’s video went viral with nearly 40 million views and counting, leading to an outpouring of support for her and sparking a profound conversation about the incident. Having navigated a challenging and embarrassing situation, Nicole has discovered a powerful sense of optimism and is eager to share that renewed perspective with the world, along with her delicious recipes and herbal remedies.
In September of 2024, Nicole and her family moved from Brandon, Vermont, along with her farm-to-table businesses Wonderlost Homestead and Folk Medicine and Remedies to Gate City, where the climate and soil was a better fit for her to grow and forage from her organic dirt farm. She also owns a small antique business and works on her social media with daily writing and cooking videos trying to incorporate gardening, cooking and homesteading.
Nicole was born in Cambridge, NY, to two chefs, Nancy and Anthony, who owned many Italian restaurants and pizza shops in the upstate New York area. She was raised around very strong Sicilian women on her father’s side and learned to cook, preserve and garden from them and her mother. She dabbled in many different job fields in her young adult life and was out on her own paying her own bills by her 16th birthday. Nothing came easy to Nicole. She worked extremely hard just to keep food on the table. She became pregnant with her first child Vera in 2006 and was a single mother until 2014 when she married her first husband, and they had their son, Dodge Marcello, in 2015. By then, she had been in the hospitality industry on and off for the better half of her life. And by 2018 she was opening her first restaurant in Clifton Park, NY with her father Anthony. When COVID hit, everything she worked so hard for basically went down the drain, and her marriage ended as well.
Originally Nicole wanted to go into the barbering and cosmetology fields, went to school for them and graduated from both. Then in 2020, when she met her now husband Chris, and he took on the role of the world’s best step dad and her biggest supporter, she decided to stick with cooking. She had been writing on the side for her social media for a few years by then, and Chris had heavily encouraged her to leave mainstream work and focus on her homestead, and social media presence. She started writing about her history in herbalism. She also took a couple of classes here and there and became very popular locally at the farmers markets as well with her herbal medicine and baked goods, pizzas and pizza doughs.
This encouraged Nicole to broaden her horizon to life outside the Northeast. On a whim, she and Chris put their homestead in Vermont up for sale and picked a place blindly on a map and started searching, and settled in the small rural town of Gate City, Virginia. “It's an old beautiful farm I had literal dreams of before seeing,” Nicole said. “Now I’m living out my dream of being independently employed.”
But when July 4, 2025 rolled along, Nicole got a rude awakening in her new town that she described in her TikTok video that day. To watch and listen to her account, click here.
“After it went viral the entire town basically came after me, doxing my son, threatening police on me and my husband and even trespassing on my property and draining our only water for the farm and house,” Russo said, “The amount of hate I’ve received from this town to this very day has been quite sad. And now we feel we no longer belong here and are actively looking for a way out.”
Despite feeling excluded from the community Russo said, “I learned that everyone deep down shares the same fear I have; The fear of rejection. That feeling can cut so deep that it made the entire world feel the pinch in some way. The positive that arose from this was something that only people daydream about. From feeling isolated and alone to overnight feeling the entire world had my back. The best part is, people get to see the real me and I enjoy sharing it. I look forward to the future and sharing much more of my work with everyone. Hopefully this situation not only changed my life, but for others as well in similar situations. That silver lining you always hear about.”
FOLLOW:
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@folkmedicineremedies
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WonderlostHomestead
SHOP:
https://stores.inksoft.com/antipasto/shop/home
https://www.ebay.com/str/wonderlosthomestead
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