Just tiramisu … Lucy Knight tucks in at Marrone, London. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Just tiramisu … Lucy Knight tucks in at Marrone, London. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian Food The age of tiramisu: a runaway dessert trend – and what it reveals about nostalgia and decadence The coffee and cream pudding has always been popular. But now it’s inspired a dedicated cafe and countless products, from drinks to ice-creams to buns. What’s behind this big cultural craving?
Lucy Knight Fri 11 Sep 2026 06.00 CEST Last modified on Fri 11 Sep 2026 06.01 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google W hen Giancarlo Fanigliulo opened Marrone, a cafe dedicated to tiramisu in London’s Soho in August, he hadn’t anticipated he would sell out within two and a half hours. “I was expecting a buzz, but I wasn’t expecting queues around the corner,” he tells me. “It was insane.”
This kind of excitement about the Italian dessert is not a one-off – we are, it seems, living in an age of tiramisu-mania. Nearly all of the high street coffee chains have offered some kind of tiramisu coffee as a seasonal special (in the US, Dunkin’ currently has four different tiramisu-flavoured drinks on its menu). Meanwhile, Haagen-Dazs and Carte D’or now sell tiramisu ice-cream, London chain Buns from Home offers a tiramisu-flavoured croissant-dough bun and social media is awash with tiramisu recipes and videos of “tiramisu drawers” – trays of the dessert ready to serve out of drawers in chefs’ kitchens – as popularised by the viral one at Manchester pasta restaurant Onda.
View image in fullscreen Marrone tiramisu. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian Marrone is not the first “just tiramisu” vendor to pop up in recent years: Sheffield’s Paradiso – which, along with classic tiramisu, will sell you a “latte-misù” (an iced coffee topped with a slab of tiramisu) – opened in 2023; while the TikTok viral Secret Layers , where you can buy the dessert from a tiny hatch in a wall, opened in Paddington, London, last year. In March, the Guinness World Record for the world’s longest tiramisu was broken when chefs assembled a 440.6 metre portion of the pudding (although there was some discussion, among my friends at least, about whether it should actually count as the longest, since it appeared to be a series of smaller portions of tiramisu joined together).
Supermarkets are also noticing an uptick in tiramisu purchases. “Sales of our own brand tiramisu range have grown by 5% over the last year, with our Tesco Finest Coffee & Amaretto Tiramisu Dessert , proving particularly popular, selling nearly 10% more,” says Peter Wood, Tesco’s category buying manager for desserts. M&S, which is currently stocking “creamy tiramisu brownies” and, at Easter, sold tiramisu hot cross buns, says tiramisu sales are up 27% compared with last year.
View image in fullscreen The ‘world’s longest’ tiramisu, at Chelsea Old Town Hall, London. Photograph: Getty Images The tiramisu trend has reached weddings, too, sometimes as a replacement for a wedding cake. The dessert “is probably one of the main trends of 2026,” says Cotswolds-based wedding planner Oliver Stanton – when we speak, he has just finished working on a wedding where tiramisu featured. “A lot of couples are having tiramisu served in coupe glasses and arranged in a tower like you would with a champagne tower. It serves as an extra photo opportunity as well as dessert for the guests.”
Tiramisu has always been a belo…