On a recent Tuesday, Daisy Echanes was perched on a stool in the downstairs of the Italian pastry shop Dolce Sicily, photographing tiramisu.
Echanes said she learned about the shop’s tiramisu on Instagram. She’d tried the coffee flavour at and it was “10/10”, she said.
So today, she’d returned with a friend to this café on Anne Street South, near Grafton Street, to try the pistachio flavour, she said.
There were two glass jars of it sitting in front of them. Echanes photographed them with her phone.
She took pictures from different angles, capturing the pale green cream filling, and the generous dusting of dark cacao.
Co-owner Fabio Bonaccorsi says he’s noticed the impact of the popularity of tiramisu on social media, on his sales.
Or at least he’s noticed an increase in sales, and has been told their tiramisu has spread online, Bonaccorsi says.
It’s the café’s most popular dessert at the moment, he says. Indeed, across Dublin, cafés and restaurants are riding the wave.
A tiramisu boom
Bonaccorsi said he co-founded Dolce Sicily in 2014 on Dawson Street. It later expanded, moving to Anne Street South, and the patisserie and restaurant now employs 52 people, he says.
He said five years ago tiramisu overtook the shop’s previous crowd favourite – the strawberry cake – and now it’s more popular than ever, the pistachio flavour in particular.
Their coffee tiramisu is creamy and served in a glass jar to help it hold its shape: light and fluffy, but structured. The pistachio version is denser and slightly sweeter.
Tiramisu at Dolce Sicilia. Photo by Sunni Bean.
He said he had a customer tell him that their tiramisu was very popular on social media, and they’d like to try it.
The cashier at the front of Dall’Italia Pastabar also said their homemade tiramisu – a more frothy, creamy tiramisu with a strong mascarpone flavour – is increasingly popular, with customers sometimes stopping in just for dessert.
Tiramisu Mania set up shop in the Moore Street Mall just a few months back – selling a wide variety of flavours including blueberry, chocolate, and hazelnut.
The owner said he’s also been approached by social media influencers to advertise their product, but that that kind of promotion is expensive, and he prefers they grow their business more organically.
Steady on
At Momento, an Italian restaurant on Camden Street, a chef Sherry Momento, said he makes the tiramisu himself for the restaurant – a few times a week.
Momento says he doesn’t see tiramisu as trendy, but as timeless. Since he started the restaurant about a decade ago, “about 60 percent of customers order tiramisu”, he says.
Yes, says Dublin resident Melissa Bottaro, who is originally from Italy. Tiramisu “is very iconic in the way pizza is iconic to Italy”.
“Tiramisu has been part of my life since I was a child, and it’s made at every celebration,” she said. “We made one for Christmas. We’ll make another one at Easter. It’s just part of my life.”
It has some core Italian ingredients, she says: eggs, sugar, flour, coffee. “I’d say very much my family is all about those ingredients. I think they’re the heart of everything we make.”
In Dublin, any Italian place will sell tiramisu, it seems, she says. “Anything that’s even slightly Italian influenced will serve it.”
Since it’s a classic, there’s a traditional way to make it, says Bottaro. “Otherwise it’s not tiramisu.”
Momento, at the Camden Street restaurant, said much the same: there can be variations, but there are rules.
“It’s very important for, like, water and sugar to arrive [at] the temperature 121,” he said. “Somebody don’t do that, like no good.”
“Or if someone just use cream, sugar, and biscuits, and no eggs. No good. No good at all,” said Momento.
In Rathmines, Universal Caffe also serves tiramisu, and Yousuf Sheleg, project developer there, said that the cafe just started about a year ago, and he hasn’t noticed a variation in the sales.
“I’ll tell you, what makes it very different to all the other tiramisu,” says Sheleg. “It’s the coffee.”
He said they have a lot of different blends of coffee and the staff did a blind taste test of tiramisu made with different blends, and settled on a chocolatey one as the best.
Their tiramisu is more solid, it can stand on its own with thick layers of lady fingers.
On Sunday afternoon customers were lingering, many elongating their mugs of coffee, some alone with laptops, others at full tables in conversation.
Either way …
At Dolce Sicily, Bonaccorsi said he’s not worried about whether or not tiramisu is just trendy. At his business, he said, part of the job is adapting.
He’s already tinkering with other pastries: he’s making more smaller fruit tarts, which are cheaper for customers, and he wants to adapt more of their pastries into a smaller size too. He also hopes to open a second shop at some point too, and sell ice cream as well.
Bonaccorsi said that what makes him happy isn’t the sales but a clean jar where the tiramisu had been.
“I’m very happy when [I see] the happy face on the customer,” he said. “This is for me, the best.”
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
Dining and Cooking