Cookbook Author Babs Costello: The Rise of “The Internet’s Favorite Grandma”

Back in 2020, as the world contracted into quarantine pods and bubbles, Barbara “Babs” Costello made her first TikTok. She was humoring her daughter, Liz Ariola, a blogger and parenting influencer with two young children and a third on the way. Babs was 13 years into retirement and had avoided social media to that point. Standing in Liz’s bright Connecticut kitchen, all shiplap and white marble, Babs, then 71, began, “Greek chicken, my grandmother’s recipe, and it’s uh, chicken and potatoes on a sheet pan—one-sheet meal.” She was a little stiff, the edits a bit jumpy, but there was something there: a maternal warmth that radiated off the screen so strongly it was like you already knew what it would feel like if she hugged you.

Credit Babs’s natural charisma, or Liz’s social media acumen, or a captive audience looking for comfort and cooking ideas—the video did well. “I didn’t have TikTok,” Babs says. “My daughter would show me her phone, and I would see all these numbers going up. She said, ‘Those are people who are following you.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, isn’t that so sweet?’ And she said, ‘Well, they expect you to post another video.’”

So Babs—a nickname given by her daughter—did a goofy little dance as she introduced herself to the public: a mom of four, grandma of eight (now nine), native of Chicago, Italian and Lebanese, lover of easy family meals. When the grandkids were napping, she and Liz made more videos, from a breakfast casserole and Italian Easter bread to a crunchy cabbage and ramen salad.

Within a few weeks, they had zeroed in on her signature greeting, “Hi, it’s Babs” (pronounced “Bayabs” with a Chicagoan’s vowel shift). Within a month, she had made friends with the camera. She experimented with sign-offs—including “Bon appétit!” à la Julia Child, although she dropped it. Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore the parallels with Child, who also rose to fame later in life, became a beloved cooking guru, and was supported by a devoted husband (in this case, Bill, or “Mr. Babs”). “I think it dawned on me fairly slowly,” Babs says, “but I would say that by the summer, I realized this was getting more serious than my original intention.”

It was the stuff of social media dreams. Upbeat, unpretentious, and fun, Babs Costello was dubbed “the Internet’s favorite grandma.” She projected the calm assurance of a woman who had raised four children and put dinner on the table every night for decades. The audience ate it up as she hammed it up, dancing around her kitchen, a place where masks and testing protocols existed far, far off-screen.

By the end of that year, @brunchwithbabs had become a legitimate business, with an employee, brand deals, and 100,000 followers. She expanded her content beyond cooking, teaching viewers how to do all the things that they may not have learned growing up, from domestic chores (Don’t forget to clean your dishwasher’s filter) to etiquette (Don’t bring anything larger than an envelope to a wedding) to life advice (Be kind to unkind people) to style tips (The best shade of pink lipstick is Estée Lauder’s Candy).

In 2022, she released her first cookbook, Celebrate with Babs: Holiday Recipes & Family Traditions, and was making regular appearances on The Drew Barrymore Show and the Today show. With each milestone, she radiated more delight, more surprise. It’s a key part of her appeal: Implicit in her success is the message that it’s never too late, and you never know when your life might change for the better.

Today, Babs has 8 million followers on TikTok and Instagram and a new cookbook, Every Day with Babs, which is her answer to the daily challenge of getting dinner on the table. The key, she says, is to have a system: sheet-pan meals on Monday, leftover-friendly dishes on Tuesday, one-pan foods on Wednesday, etc.

For now, she’s having the time of her life and remains the same reassuring, sunny, funny, high-energy Babs from 2020. She has also proven to be a more astute businesswoman than her grandma persona might let on. While raising her family in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Babs founded and ran a nursery school called The Growing Tree. She’s a natural teacher, but also a savvy marketer. “I’m half Lebanese, and I’m told that they were the original merchants,” she says. “My mom was a natural salesperson, and I think I inherited a little bit of that. If you believe in what you’re doing, then you really want to share the good news.”

So now Babs gets recognized in restaurants, airports, and grocery stores. She no longer goes out in sweats. And she has a new venture: a storybook 1830s cottage overlooking Connecticut’s Silvermine River, an area long known as a haven for artists. She calls it the Basket House (it once served as a basketmaker’s studio, and before that a blacksmith’s shop). Over the past year, her audience followed along as she made extensive renovations, including raising the house two feet above the floodplain. It serves as part-time home and full-time Babs Headquarters. This, in turn, has led to a partnership with the furniture retailer Birch Lane for a line of Babs-inspired furniture and accessories. Now you can shop the look of her breakfast nook, her solarium dining room, her gingham chairs, her favorite cabbage plates. A television series feels inevitable, though her team is mum on the subject.

For now the Basket House will serve as the backdrop for all the serotonin-boosting TikToks and Instagram reels that many of us have come to rely on. It’s the perfect container for the most charming (and charmed) life.

Featured Recipes from Babs Costello

Pesto Rack of Lamb with Tomato-Mozzarella Salad
Matt’s Favorite Finger Lickin’ Good Sweet & Sour Ribs
Chicken with Orzo, Corn & Goat Cheese
Strawberry Shortcake Sheet Cake

This feature was originally published as “Babs Knows Best” in the July/August 2025 issue of Yankee.

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

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