Chef Turns Pasta Into Art, Including Favorite Kids’ Characters — See Some of His Best!

Lawyer-turned-pasta chef Danny Freeman first started his unique cartoon pasta recreations to entertain his young daughter

Before becoming the viral culinary sensation on TikTok known as @dannylovespasta, Danny Freeman was a lawyer who could never pass up a bowl of what he calls his “ultimate comfort food.”

Growing up in a big Italian-American family, Freeman, 37, says his upbringing was “very food-centered,” but he never expected he’d one day have a following of more than 1 million people eating up (figuratively!) his unique and creative pasta creations.

“I figured if I give this up after two weeks, I'll just delete the account,” he tells PEOPLE of the TikTok account he started in January 2021. “None of my friends would ever have to know about it and I didn't really have any expectations.”

Three years later, Freeman’s pasta content has nearly 75 million “likes” on TikTok alone and he released a cookbook, aptly titled “Danny Loves Pasta,” in June.

His pasta-making journey began as a way for him to honor his grandmother’s memory when she unexpectedly died in 2020. Freeman, who had a close bond with her, says he has “a lot of strong memories attached to food being a way that people would show their love,” especially with his grandmother.

“She was just a very radiant person,” Freeman shares. “She was the type of person that everyone always wanted to be around, and I was very shy as a kid. I felt like she really saw me.”

Freeman was grieving the loss of his beloved grandmother while he was also adjusting to parenthood as a new father. He found himself in the kitchen late at night, making homemade dough and experimenting with different ingredients and pasta shapes.

He ultimately started posting videos on TikTok as a way to document his progress, and quickly gained a following.

“To watch it grow over time to now where there's actually a physical book in the world and I got all these opportunities that I never expected, it's been strange to think about it in that way since it started just at home by myself,” he says.

After sharing some more basic videos making homemade dough, Freeman started experimenting with natural ingredients in his dough like spinach and beets to create colored pasta, and began making more unique pasta shapes like a rose and a pinwheel.

Eventually, pasta fans started requesting that Freeman add unconventional ingredients like Oreos, pretzels and matzah into his dough, and he happily obliged, saying he gets “a lot of inspiration from people leaving a comment saying, ‘Can you try this?’ ‘Can you try that?’ ”

After he recreated his daughter’s favorite cartoon character, Peppa Pig, a new ravioli series with recreations of cartoon characters and other fan favorites was born.

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"She was really loving Peppa Pig, so I thought for a while I should make a Peppa Pig ravioli. And when I finally did, she loved it and I posted it, people kept asking for other cartoon characters,” Freeman says. “It sort of snowballed from there when people were asking for all their favorites, but that has been a really fun series.”

Freeman went on to make more cartoons including Hello Kitty, Bluey and Baby Shark, and has made pasta recreations of celebrities like Danny DeVito, Harry Styles and SZA (an avid Danny Loves Pasta fan herself).

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While he wishes his grandmother was here to see his success, Freeman thinks she would enjoy his unique pasta making and appreciate that he “doesn’t take it too seriously.”

“I think my grandmother would absolutely love what I'm doing,” he shares. “She would think it was amazing and she'd get a kick out of it. My grandmother had a real zest for life, she was just very joyful and I feel like the type of cooking I do, the videos I do and the cookbook I wrote is very joyful.”

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