The age of tiramisu: a runaway dessert trend – and what it reveals about nostalgia and decadence

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When 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.

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.

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.”