SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND
MARCH 18, 2026
STRANGER: Nick Sevilla
LOCATION: Samantha’s Restaurant, 631 University Boulevard, Silver Spring, Maryland
THEME: A math teacher’s formula for food and community
For Nick Sevilla, food has always been about community.
He recalls being four years old playing with toy race cars on the counter of his dad’s old Bethesda restaurant. With affection, he talks about the sprawling gatherings of his father’s family – one of nine siblings – where food was always the centerpiece. And he smiles when talking about what his dream restaurant could look like, if he ever opens one.
All of that tracks for someone who’s gaining traction on TikTok as “Mr. 8 That,” reviewing food throughout the DMV (the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia).
Over 25,000 people watch his videos on TikTok, with more than half a million total views and rising. Nick samples food either in his car or at a dining spot, then rates it on a scale of 1 to 5 for price and taste. Anything that totals 8 or more “8 that” – and is deserving of Nick’s highest praise.
Given his extracurricular adventures traversing the region for the best bites, I deferred to him on picking the venue for tonight’s interview: Samantha’s Restaurant, in Silver Spring.
While we browse the menu, Nick reveals the spot has a special place in his heart. Growing up, he and his brother would hang out at his dad’s since-closed venue – Terramar, near the Tasty Diner in Bethesda. His mum worked there too. It served small, shareable Latin American plates – tapas before tapas became a thing.
When Terramar closed, one of the staff came over to Silver Spring and eventually opened up Samantha’s. So eating here is always personal for Nick. “This used to be a monthly stop,” he says. “You get a nice meal, it’s homey and authentic.”
The dining room is one large rectangle – soothing sea-blue walls and dark wooden panels surround pristine white cloth tables. The servers are warm and attentive, and the overall ambiance puts me at ease. So much so that I spill my margarita over the chips and salsa they serve once you sit down, in a hurry to have more of that delicious dip. I apologize.
Nick smiles. “That’s all right, added flavor to the chips.”
Given his connection to the place, I defer to Nick on the appetizers. Up first is yuca con chicharrón: fried yuca topped with sautéed morsels of pork, tomatoes, pico de gallo and a homemade tomato wine sauce. A rich, hearty and very moreish starter.
We’re also sharing pupusas – corn masa dough filled with pork and cheese, served with curtido, pickled cabbage. Nick shows me how to eat this: take one, cut a piece off, add the curtido, between this and the yuca, it’s a delicious way to begin our meal.
Before we met, we’d both put in full days at our jobs. So, in-between bites of this great start to the meal, I ask him to walk me through a typical day with work and Mr. 8 That.
Nick is 35 and a full-time math teacher. He wakes up at 5:15 a.m., gets an hour to an hour and a half of video editing in before the school day starts. By 7:15 he’s out the door, arriving at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Germantown by 7:30. He teaches five periods of math – three advanced, two on-level – from 7:50 until 3 p.m.
Then the second shift begins. Right now it’s baseball season, so he coaches at Seneca Valley High School until 6 or 6:30, whenever the last kid gets picked up. In winter, it’s boys’ basketball at MLK. He gets home around 7, has dinner with his wife Jenna – who’s taken over cooking duties because of his schedule – and from 8 to 9:30, if there’s nothing to grade, he’s back downstairs starting the next video. Sleep must be an afterthought.
“My weekends are where I maximize,” he says. He’ll plan a trip to Baltimore or Frederick or down into DC or Virginia. Sometimes he’ll hit more than one spot in a day – a learning curve, he admits, after putting on 5 to 10 pounds since starting the food content.
His wife, also a teacher and basketball coach, is supportive but keeps him honest. They have a two-week budget, color-coded: bills, car, groceries, gas, and then a small window for dining out. He doesn’t always stay inside it when picking venues, and he’s got plenty to select from.
Nick pulls out his phone and shows me a map with hundreds of pins, color-coded by cuisine, scattered across Maryland, DC, Virginia and beyond. Every time someone leaves a comment recommending a place, he adds it to a spreadsheet and it populates on the map. There are clusters around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, dots as far north as Gettysburg. It’s less of a checklist, he says, and more of a framework, so wherever he is, he can see what’s nearby.
He knows the DMV well, being born and raised in Montgomery County. He went through North Chevy Chase, Barnsley, Westland and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, living on the border of Bethesda, Kensington and Rockville. His dad, the youngest of nine in a Latin American family, still works in the food industry as a purveyor. The family gatherings were productions, with food always at the center.
After high school, he went to the University of Maryland, College Park, initially studying secondary math education – meaning high school. But the higher-level mathematical theory courses weren’t clicking. “I think my brain taps out around calc,” he says. When his advisor mentioned a new program for middle school education, Nick jumped at the opportunity.
“I knew in high school that I wanted to be a coach,” he responds, when I ask him what first drew him to teaching. He knew a school would be the easiest route to that, and he wanted a job with a sense of community (that word again) between staff, students, parents, athletics. “You feel like your work is purposeful and it’s going towards a good cause, which is the kids.”
His teaching inspiration was an eighth-grade film teacher named Ms. Cosby. She was vibrant, he says, and she changed the way he looked at movies, teaching the class to spot purposeful choices a director makes, the details you don’t catch on a first watch. But she could also joke with her students, be sarcastic, give back everything they gave her.
That balance – fun but purposeful – became Nick’s model with teaching. He started at Greenbelt Middle School in Prince George’s County, coaching baseball there for two years. Then he came to MLK, where he’s been for a decade.
The baseball coaching at Seneca Valley is newer – last year they offered him the junior varsity job, but not enough kids turned out for a JV team. He’s still working with the varsity program, and for many of these kids it’s their first time playing organized baseball, years behind schools with established programs. So how does he get the attention of a bunch of 12-year-olds?
“The relationship piece is the most important,” he says. You teach the content, you set guidelines and boundaries, but you make them feel seen. “At the end of the day, they’re kids. All they want to do is feel seen and be treated with respect.”
Respect is something he says he gets from some kids at his school who were familiar not just with Mr. 8 That, but with Nick’s first viral hit: AlgebruhTV.
When the pandemic hit, Nick and Jenna had been in their house about a year. Like a lot of people, they were playing video games to pass the time. He had friends who streamed on Twitch, so he gave it a try. But Twitch, he explains, is terrible for getting discovered, the platform doesn’t push new creators the way TikTok or Instagram does.
So on January 1st of that year, he committed to posting on TikTok every single day. He made it to November. The account – the math teacher who plays video games – took off. He went from 4,000 followers to 20,000, then 60,000, eventually peaking around 174,000.
Nick describes his approach as the 95/5 rule. “Ninety-five percent of the things you post are not going to do as well as you think. But the 5% that do push the other 95%, because people see the five, they go, oh, this guy’s funny. They follow, they go to your page, watch the rest.”
He played a competitive shooter called Valorant and at one point cracked the top 10,000 players in the country. But he knew he’d never have the time or the mechanical skill to climb higher. Once he reached that ceiling, he’d just be playing to farm content – and that inauthenticity, he knew, would come across on screen.
The kids at school found the account immediately. “They were like, this is cool,” he says. There are MCPS rules about communicating with students through social media, so if a kid DMs him, it’s a block, no exceptions. He tells them in person the next day. No hard feelings, just a line he won’t cross.
Through AlgebruhTV, he started doing sponsored ads for TikTok’s creator marketplace – a nice side hustle. But eventually he started to think about doing something he’s passionate about that doesn’t require sitting at a computer for three to four hours a day.
The answer was food.
The first version of the food review account was called “4plus4foodandbev.” It didn’t stick. Nick workshopped names with friends, wanting to incorporate his math background into the brand the way he had with AlgebruhTV. One friend cut through the brainstorming: forget the addition, just be Mr. 8 That. Nick was hesitant at first. “I feel like sometimes it’s hard for me to take creative direction because I want it to be my own thing,” he admits.
But the more he thought about it, the more it clicked, on several levels: the number 8, as in the scoring threshold; “ate,” as in he ate the food; and “ate” as slang for “you killed it.”
Turns out the calculation method is fitting for the math teacher. His scoring system rates price from 1 to 5, taste from 1 to 5. Anything totaling 8 or more passes. And there’s a built-in floor: as a teacher, Nick lives by what he calls the 50% rule – turn in something, you get a 50. So nothing ever scores below a 2.5 in either category, because that adds up to 5, which is a D. An 8 is a B. “I would recommend,” he says. “You did a fairly good job.”
The price element generates conversation, meaning comments, which push the visibility of his videos. “Everyone views price differently,” he says. A $500 birthday dinner at Elmina in DC? He thought it was fantastic. Someone else might never spend that.
“I would never pay X dollars for a sandwich” lives right next to “this is a great deal” in his comments section. That’s by design.
Nick films some reviews in his car, others inside the restaurant. The car is his comfort zone – no social awkwardness, just him and the food.
A pivotal early moment came at the Stained Glass Pub in Wheaton, a dimly lit dive bar that serves Maryland-style pizza. He was doing a collab and was convinced there was no way they could film inside. His collaborator pulled out a ring light and started setting up. The bartender asked if they wanted the lights adjusted to help out.
“It was kind of an eye-opening moment for me that businesses want positive promotion,” Nick says. Now he’ll bring a tripod, pick a table off to the side, mic up and let it roll. Everything is shot on his iPhone.
His editing style is borrowed from his gaming days – popping text, sound effects, memes spliced in to give the content personality. It takes anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours per video, with his brother – a full-time editor in LA who works for YouTube’s most-viewed food creator, Nick DiGiovanni – as an occasional mentor.
When he’s not necessarily in love with a particular dish or venue, Nick stays constructive. He’s never spitting anything out, never saying a place is awful. “It wasn’t for me” or “maybe this is an off day” are his positive spins that avoid being malicious or snarky.
“I really appreciate your honesty,” is the comment he hears most from followers. The discourse on his page runs about 80/20 or 90/10 positive. For the internet, those are remarkable odds.
For our main course, we both order the lomo saltado – a Peruvian-inspired dish of French fries, grilled onions and peppers with chicken. I’ll save Nick’s review for a little later on, but just know that this outstanding plate would easily get one of his 8s if I was rating.
I ask Nick what his favorite spots have been so far. There’s so many.
There’s Ekiben in Baltimore, an Asian fusion restaurant expanding into Frederick, where the chefs are constantly pushing the envelope with collaborations. There’s Hijos del Maíz, a food truck on Rockville Pike run by a former Michelin chef who imports corn from Mexico and makes tortillas daily. And there’s A&J Restaurant, a Chinese spot in the basement of a shopping center on Rockville Pike where everything – noodles, dumplings, all of it – is made from scratch.
The cuisine he’s developed the most appreciation for is West African – Ghanaian, Nigerian. Deep spice blends, stewed meals you eat with your hands. At a Nigerian restaurant in Wheaton, he tried a dish called forero – collard greens cooked down with smoked turkey leg and dried fish, served with fufu.
“I took a bite and I am not a greens person,” he says. “But there was this unctuousness from the smoked turkey, and then there was definitely a dried fish element in the broth. I was like, this is a flavor I’ve never tasted before.”
He tries to order something new every time. The one thing he can’t stand? Peas. The little round frozen ones. Growing up, his parents would make a Trader Joe’s fried rice packet as an easy dinner, and every time, he’d sit there picking them out. I tell him I used to do the same thing with the okra in canned Campbell’s gumbo. We share a laugh at our peccadilloes.
His perfect last supper? A plate of buffalo wings and Maryland-style pizza from the Stained Glass Pub. Simple. Perfect.
But let’s focus on the present. What’s next?
The dream, eventually, is sustainability. Nick and Jenna eventually hope to have a kid, and in an ideal scenario, Mr. 8 That could generate enough for him to be home with the baby while still filming at his leisure.
Nick met Jenna 12 years ago through teaching. She was the girls’ basketball coach at a neighboring French immersion school in Prince George’s County, and their teams played each other routinely. He made up an excuse to go talk to her about one of her players, then asked her out. They’ve been married almost three years.
She’s his partner in the content, too – appearing in about 70% of the videos as his “napkin person,” holding the food, going back and forth on scores. Having a second perspective matters more than people realize, he says. “I feel really lucky with her. Especially with the food one, she can be a part of that world.”
Nick knows that building his Mr. 8 That audience may take more time than AlgebruhTV. The food content space is far more saturated than one for a math teacher playing video games.
But he’s patient with it. And the joy he takes in promoting local spots, in talking about great food, and in bringing people together online is clear in both his videos and across the table.
I wonder if, given his countless visits to restaurants, he might eventually want to own one, and what type of food it would serve?
He pauses. He loves Southeast Asian cuisine, he says, but he’s not an expert – he’d need someone to be the driving force behind the kitchen. He’d want it to feel like Samantha’s: intimate, authentic, not too big. And rather than focusing on one country’s cuisine, he’d pull from a whole region – the way this restaurant blends Peruvian and Salvadoran and Mexican influences under one roof.
“Now that I say it out loud,” he laughs, “I have to iron out my concept a little bit.”
Before I ask for the check, I put him on the spot one more time. I ask him to do a mini Mr. 8 That review of the lomo saltado in front of him.
He doesn’t miss a beat.
“The sauce is the star here,” he says, sitting up. “It’s rich, it’s salty, it has this nice depth of flavor that you’re getting from the chicken. But then the fresh vegetables are not only a crunch but a relief of sweetness that cuts the salinity. And of course, you can bring in the rice and beans to temper that down and give it more body.”
He pauses, takes another bite. “The chicken has a crustiness to it, but it’s still got some juice. And even though fries are never really that good the second day, I have a funny feeling this will still be good tomorrow.”
It’s a small, polished performance, the kind of thing that looks effortless on a 90-second TikTok but is, in reality, the product of a man who wakes up early to edit, teaches math all day, coaches a sport until dark, and then does it all again.
Nick grew up around food, around family, around the kind of diverse, patchwork communities that most people drive past without noticing. What he’s doing now with Mr. 8 That – one video at a time, one hidden gem at a time – is making sure people stop and notice.
And in the comments under every video, his followers are doing the same thing: recommending places to each other, sharing their experiences, adding more pins to the map.
It’s a community built around food, exactly where he started.