Carlos Parisi might have the highest percentage of Detroit-based Instagram followers – even more than Mayor Mike Duggan – but he’s not letting fame define his brand.
Born in Mexico City and raised in Detroit, Parisi is perhaps most well known as the owner of Aunt Nee’s prepared foods. Every Saturday you can find him in Eastern Market surrounded by a stacked tower of bags of tortilla chips, salsa, and guacamole. Parisi has been a staple vendor at the market for the last 16 years. But his influence across the food scene in Detroit extends to many corners of the city, including pop-ups, collaborations, media appearances and event hosting.
Amid it all, the 36-year-old creates simple videos and posts about local food businesses in Detroit for social media. It landed him the ranking as Detroit’s number one influencer on Instagram.
The ranking, calculated by the influencer marketing management tool Modash, is based on the percentage of a user’s Detroit-based followers. There may be other influencers who have more followers, but Parisi’s audience has the highest percentage of Detroiters; 54.4% of his Instagram audience lives in Detroit. His most watched video has nearly 355,000 views.
When the food hits his taste buds just right, he posts videos about what he’s eating and what’s good, including recent videos about Marupo Eats dumplings and Dearborn Meat Market.
Parisi said he doesn’t remember when or why he started posting videos about Detroit food online.
“I want to talk about my friends (in the business), and that’s really it. That’s all it’s ever been,” he said. “I want to make sure that we’re all talking about each other, supporting each other in this world.”
After Parisi, Modash ranked Duggan, entrepreneur Amber Lewis, and artist Taylor Bentley as the top Detroit influencers on Instagram.
Parisi may have landed at the top of Modash’s list, but he said he doesn’t identify as an influencer and doesn’t do paid videos.
“Don’t pay me. That’s weird. Because then it’s not genuine. I want to feel like I can actually talk about your place,” he said.
What really matters to Parisi is the culture, the ambience and the people – from the back of the house to the front – and how they’re being treated and treating customers. Spots like Mike’s Famous Ham Place, Parisi said, which has been run by the same couple for half a century. It offers a small menu but a huge ham sandwich at a reasonable price.
“Different places like that, I believe the story means so much, because the people behind it are the reasons that you definitely want to go. They put their heart and soul into something,” he said. It’s great food, yeah, but that’s almost secondary to what it’s like when you walk in and you can taste the love or soul in something.”
Pizza, sandwiches and crab cakes
One of Parisi’s earliest memories is at 4 years old. His family went to Eastern Market Seafood – which no longer exists – and he was handed a crab cake warmed in a toaster oven and wrapped in wax paper.
“I loved crab cakes as a kid. I still do – if you can find those imitation puck crab cakes, I will pay good money for those, because I don’t think they make them anymore,” Parisi said.
But he became so engrossed in the crab cake that he wandered away without even realizing: “My mom came running up crying because she thought that I was gone.”
The tunnel vision food never wavered and later came full circle when Parisi ended up back at Eastern Market as a vendor.
As a young adult, Parisi held various corporate jobs and food jobs, including a two-day stint at Outback Steakhouse and working at a Little Caesars in Dearborn.
“It was a lot of fun because we did everything the old way. So we would do all of our dough, grind our cheese, we would make our sauce every day, things that typically a real pizza place would do, we did,” he said.
Then around 2009, Parisi began selling Aunt Nee’s at Eastern Market’s farmers markets. It started out as dry seasoning packets to make salsa before transitioning to tortilla chips, fresh salsa and guacamole around 2016. In the same era he launched the High Five Taco pop-up, Pakistani food pop-up Khana Detroit with Maryam Khan, and Detroit Sandwich Week, a five-day event where people visit local restaurants for sandwiches between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
In 2019, Parisi started the Sandwich Talk podcast, where different guests like local chefs and cultural figures eat a sandwich with Parisi and talk about things.
Somewhere in between it all, he became a board member of Eastern Market Partnership.
In recent years, he made his media debut as host of Chef RV on YouTube, was featured on HBO Max’s “What Am I Eating” with Zooey Deschanel, and last year, began writing articles about food for Click on Detroit.
This June, he will be piloting a new comedy TV show about sandwiches filmed at Planet Ant and in the fall, he will launch a collaboration between Mexico City and Detroit artists and chefs.
‘A great ambassador’
Walking around Eastern Market on a quieter winter Tuesday afternoon, it’s obvious that people are engaged with Parisi’s life, online and off.
The owner of Eastern Market’s Indian gastropub Midnight Temple drove by with a grin on his face and his arm stretched out to slap hands with Carlos. An Eastern Market security guard waved from his van on his rounds. At Mitsos, Andy Sofikitis welcomed Parisi, a regular, suggesting he get more food. But Parisi – always on a food mission – said he had to eat two hours later. The walkabout ended at Anthology Coffee, where Parisi chatted with the owner about organic cane sugar and tried a new coffee drink on the menu.
Mark Kurlyandchik, a James Beard Award-winning documentary filmmaker and former Detroit Free Press restaurant critic, said Parisi adds a lot of personality to the local food scene.
“He’s like the love child of Jeff Spicoli (from Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and Guy Fieri if he was born in Mexico City and all about community,” said Kurlyandchik.
He said Parisi brings a great energy to storytelling and is friendly and welcoming to everyone.
“He’s a great ambassador for Detroit in that way – he speaks up for immigrant communities, the communities that built this place, the Black community, but he’s also like ‘everyone come in and let’s party.’”
In June 2024, Parisi published a video to Instagram about Ackroyd’s Scottish Bakery in Redford Township garnering 282,000 views. The bakery is now an e-commerce operation.
Ackroyd’s General Manager Joe Hakim said it’s hard to correlate sales directly to things like a video, but said the impact on social media was “priceless.” The bakery gained 2,000 Instagram followers after the video, representing a 50% increase. It came at a time that the small business was struggling, Hakim said.
“We weren’t expecting what happened,” he said. “The increase in our social media audience was massive. That is, in and of itself, priceless in terms of the ability to get in front of more eyes as far as we’re concerned.”
It’s all about Detroit for Parisi: He even says his last meal would be the Detroit classic Coney dog.
“I have such a passion for the city… the reason why we are still all here. Everybody could have just gone. If you want to do something, people typically move to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, to be all that they can be,” he said. “I have such an adoration for everybody that stuck it out here, made this city what they want to see, and has been part of the community.”