Served in bike baskets and reimagined with limoncello or chai, tiramisu is taking center stage
Onda Pasta Bar’s tiramisu drawer looks like something from a Hayao Miyazaki adaptation of a Dr. Seuss book, which is to say it evokes the quiet elegance of a satin glove (clouds of creamy, whipped mascarpone and raw egg floating upon house-made sponge cake, coated with a dusting of cocoa powder) underpinned by a cartoonish sense of excess (why is there so much of it?).
The Manchester-based restaurant utilizes a long, refrigerated metal drawer that slides open to reveal a huge slab of tiramisu that can be scooped into at least 25 individual servings. The restaurant’s workers weren’t trying to make a gastronomic oddity when they developed it; they were just trying to make their jobs a little easier. Onda was a pop-up in a food hall at the time, and they didn’t have a lot of space to store ingredients or dishes. They tweaked a common restaurant practice—using drawers to store chopped vegetables or other ingredients—to prep tiramisu in advance so that they could efficiently serve it throughout the night. Just open, scoop, and serve.
A year after the drawer was introduced, co-owner Patrick Brown was watching the head chef scoop tiramisu when he realized that the whole process was unusual enough to intrigue and amuse people online. In September of 2023, he posted a video of the drawer in action on the restaurant’s Instagram account. At first, nothing happened. But the next day, someone commented, “I want one of these in my bedside drawer,” and the video blew up. By that evening, it had 10 million views across TikTok and Instagram and had been shared by celebrities like Florence Pugh.
Since then, the drawer has gained a cult following. The initial traffic brought in from the video was enough for Onda to launch a permanent location—which became immediately booked for the next nine months. To this day, some customers come in a few times a week to order tiramisu, Brown says. The pop star Sabrina Carpenter even recently made a pilgrimage to Onda with the specific intention of seeing the drawer while in England.
Beyond Onda’s corner of the universe, the video’s impact is arguably even greater. Last spring and summer, content creators like Jules Park and Sarah Stanback-Young started making and posting their own tiramisu drawers, constructed inside the section of the fridge that usually houses fruit. Then, at the beginning of 2025, things really started to escalate. Over the last few months, the Italian dessert has oozed its way through, across, and into nearly any public space you can imagine. It has been put in glass purses and worn as a fashion accessory; it has been eaten out of car consoles and Citi Bike baskets; and it has been constructed in a tractor bed. The trend of serving tiramisu in unexpected places has gotten so ubiquitous that doctors have weighed in, warning people that they are at risk of contracting salmonella and listeria if they eat raw egg that has been stored in warm environments for too long.
The videos push unbridled desire into the realm of disgust. The running bit in many of the original refrigerator videos was “This huge portion is the exact amount of tiramisu I want to eat!” But creators now put tiramisu in contexts that feel distinctly unsavory. When you see the dessert constructed in a tractor or, yes, a toilet, the food becomes defined by, or rather in opposition to, the vessel that holds it.
There’s a parallel tension between the familiarity and novelty of tiramisu that is bolstering its current virality. It is a comfort food for many people, one that evokes simple luxury and that they might know how to make at home. At the same time, because folks are so familiar with it, they react viscerally when it is presented in a strange way. Content creators capitalize off that shock by scheming up increasingly intense stunts using the dessert.
Juliette Moreno is a chef and content creator known for, as she describes it, “cooking with no rules.” She got started three years ago with a video on how to cook steak in a toaster. Since then, she’s made pancakes on a hair straightener, hamburgers on a clothing iron, and even ribs on a car engine. She’s posted numerous videos of herself constructing and eating tiramisu in strange settings, including in a car console, a cooler, and a Citi Bike basket.
She doesn’t actually fill these spaces with the sticky, hard-to-clean dessert. “Most of the time there is a smaller container within the car console or the bike that is actually holding the tiramisu,” she says. “I can easily take it out [after recording the video] and have my friends eat it, which prevents a lot of food waste.”
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But in her videos, it looks like the food is being eaten straight out of the vessel. The videos have been performing well, she says, largely because of the level of indignation they evoke, especially when viewers are familiar with the food she’s cooking. “People get mad when you don’t season your steak or your chicken, or if you snap your pasta in half before you boil it, because they think there’s a certain way you have to cook those foods,” she says. “It’s the same with putting tiramisu in a compartment where it’s not usually supposed to be. Those actions really trigger people.”
Brown thinks that Onda’s video was so popular because the restaurant similarly tapped into that sense of familiarity while presenting viewers with something unexpected. Tiramisu had started trending in 2023: Recipe developers at the time were iterating on the traditional format, restaurants started serving it tableside, and paint company C2 even named it the color of the year. (Since then, it has worked its way into a Lindt truffle flavor, was incorporated into a brownie recipe that went viral in September 2024, and is currently being served out of tiny helmets at New York Yankees games for $12.50 a pop.)
Yet the specific presentation of Onda’s video was a novelty. “It was the right food at the right time,” Brown says. “Tiramisu has been having a moment. But also, people saw something they had never seen before in our video. People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter online, so you have to show them something new to make an impact. The longer a trend goes on, the less of an impression each video makes. That’s why the videos are getting weirder and weirder, to keep people [hooked].”
This isn’t the Italian dessert’s first time in the spotlight, either. The exact origins of tiramisu are disputed, but they are generally traced to an Italian restaurant called Le Beccherie in Treviso that developed it in the early 1970s, Eater’s Melissa McCart wrote in a 2016 article about the dessert’s history. It was popularized in the United States in the early 1980s, in part due to its inclusion on the menu at Upper East Side restaurant Felidia, and it quickly stirred up a frenzy then, too. McCart adds that by 1989 a critic in the New York Times had written that many of her friends were raving about the dessert at dinner parties she attended in San Francisco. The Americans she knew were excited by the energizing potential of a dessert that featured coffee, and they were charmed by its mythology. It is often rumored to have been served at brothels because the coffee functions as an aphrodisiac, though there isn’t much actual evidence of this happening.
@itsmeju1iette this would heal me. ☀️😎 #trending #viral ♬ Reggae Island – Julian Angel and Chiko U
Almost everyone I speak to about tiramisu’s lasting popularity among recipe developers and home cooks alike mentions its riffability. It’s a fairly straightforward formula that anyone can understand and easily customize. Sometimes the coffee is swapped for another liquid, like limoncello or chai. Other times, fruits like strawberries or mangoes are added in. What gives the recipes a sense of continuity is the inclusion of whipped mascarpone and egg layered with some kind of soaked biscuit.
Food writer and recipe developer Mehreen Karim feels that a recipe often gains traction when many different kinds of people can see themselves in it. “There are so many cross-cultural variations that make people feel represented for whatever their identity is,” she says, noting South and East Asian twists like Kashmiri chai and matcha. There’s a kind of accessible luxury to the dessert, Kareem adds, that leads to developers using it to market their food. “The assumption that is being made, and I think it’s very accurate, is that people will immediately buy into a dessert that is creamy and impressive.”
She adds that, ideally, recipe developers, especially recipe developers of color, wouldn’t have to define their recipes based on trending and familiar foods, which tend to be European and white. “If we lived in a world where everything was based on accuracy or objectivity, fewer dishes would be called ‘tiramisu,’” she says. “But that’s what piques people’s interest. From a marketing perspective, it would be dumb to call something a Kashmiri chai layer cake when everyone’s posting their tiramisu. I just wish we could get to a place where we didn’t have to Italianize our food for it to make sense to others.”
Despite the decadence associated with it, tiramisu is an easy dish to make. In general, Italian restaurant culture is seen as a bit more rustic than, say, a French patisserie. As such, it strikes a balance as a luxurious food that still feels accessible and familiar, like you’re eating a home-cooked meal or sharing in a family-style entree. Social media consultant and former Bon Appétit social media manager Rachel Karten says she’s seen the dessert pop up at events like Alison Roman’s and Justine Doiron’s respective weddings. She thinks it is so popular in these settings because it has a bit of a cool-girl, no-fuss vibe to it. “It’s a dessert that doesn’t need to be perfect or too pretty, and it’s just sort of a sum of its few parts,” she says. “It really feels like a communal dessert that anyone can dig into. You’re not going to ruin it the way you might ruin a cake by cutting it wrong or whatever.”
That sense of familiarity also allows the details of the recipe to take a back seat to the personalities of the content creators making it online. “I think simple recipes can perform better sometimes on Reels because you’re watching them for entertainment rather than to actually make the recipe,” Karten says. “You’ll see comments on a food creator’s post like, ‘You’re my comfort creator.’ And that’s because it’s just calming to watch somebody put together ingredients and create a recipe, even if you don’t plan to make it yourself. Often they play music, and it’s just a vibe and fun to watch.”
I hadn’t realized the extent to which chefs function as lifestyle role models for me until I considered the wilted head of cabbage in my fridge. I bought it because I love Padma Lakshmi’s Instagram videos with her daughter—their playful relationship, her distinctly Indian American mannerisms, the homeyness of the videos—and I thought maybe I would make a stewed tamarind and coconut milk cabbage recipe she had posted. Since I bought the cabbage two weeks ago, I’ve watched approximately 50 more of her videos and have not attempted the recipe once.
When you make and market food online, sometimes the taste and eating experience end up coming second to everything else about it—the aesthetic, the memories it evokes, the vibe of the person making it. Sometimes the changes this approach evokes are subtle. A recipe developer will tweak a beloved tiramisu recipe to include ingredients from their culture. People watching videos of the recipe might never make it, but the food still becomes a small symbol of their hybridized lived experience. Other times, content creators like Moreno distort food in an intentionally lawless and surreal way to stretch and challenge their viewers’ comfort levels, sometimes to the indelibly extreme.
It’s tiramisu’s ability to function as a tabula rasa that makes it especially popular online. It can fit into any location or vessel; it can be used to make homey, feel-good content, or it can be pulled in weird, unexpected directions; and it feels rustic and low effort while evoking a sense of opulence. It’s a food that people know, that they can project their fantasies and indignities onto in equal measure, whether it tastes delicious or is drenched in pickle juice.