How the “Italian chef kiss” became a snarky internet cliché

Mama mia! That’s a spicy stereotype-a! When one wants to mock something online by pretending to overpraise it lavishly, only two words are necessary to get the message across: “chef kiss.” That’s enough to conjure the image of a prototypical Italian chef raising his fingers to his lips in a gesture of cartoonish delight, as if the thing being reviewed couldn’t possibly be any better. But where did this cliché come from and how did “chef kiss” become the exemplar of social media snark? Jay Hathaway has investigated this question for The Daily Dot and reports his findings in his piece “The Rich, Delicious History Of *Italian Chef Kiss*.” The answer turns out to be complicated: a mixture of actual Italian culture, American marketing, and the murky politics of Twitter and Reddit. The Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show is also somehow involved, even though he’s patently not Italian.