Whatever happened to paninis? (And other food fad tales)

Sunday, 25 January 2026

Who could resist that grilled goodness? Those squished bready ovals scored with perfect char marks, squelching cheesy fat.

If it was stuffed with chicken, apricot and camembert, so much the better.

Like most food fads, it’s not clear exactly how or when the panini hit Kiwi cafes. The first mention in our archives is from 1996, when Christchurch got the Panini Bar.

Run by chef Phillip Nordt, it offered the grilled flatbreads with fillings as revolutionary as eggplant, stir-fried peppers and lamb sausage, for just $4.50.

Panini, the article explains, means little bread in Italian.

They soon became so mainstream you could fill both your car and your craving at BP. We surely hit peak panini in 2004, when Nelson ice cream maker Penguino launched a gelato panini. Yes, really.

And then they fizzled. Sure, you can still find them in the odd cafe. Pak’n Save Papakura sells an (unfilled) 4-pack of herb and garlic for $4.49. But they’ve mostly disappeared from cafe cabinets.

So what happened? Reddit has thoughts.

“They all got deconstructed in the Great Sun-dried Purge of 2009,” says one commenter, referencing the parallel demise of sundried tomatoes on everything.

“We all decided pies are better and cooked salad greens are s…” another offers.

Another blames political parody guy Tom Sainsbury.

“Thomas Sainsbury ruined them by making them Paula Bennett’s kai of choice in his skits. Turned the nation off them.”

The truth is probably more dull. Like most food fads, we got bored and moved on.

The panini is dead! Long live the toastie!

Sliding in to our fickle stomachs

When chef Al Brown was learning to cook in a Boston sports bar in his 20s, he came across an unfamiliar name - slider.

“I went, oh, that’s a little baby hamburger.”

Two decades later, opening Auckland restaurant Depot in 2011, he remembered the little morsel with the cute name, and chucked one on the menu.

“No-one had heard of a slider then, now they’re everywhere.”

He reckons that one snapper or turbot slider got people talking. And that was enough to start a national food trend.

By 2012, sliders had passed the universal cultural acceptance test - they appeared in an Alison Holst column.

Brown says food trends often start with a chef looking for a point of difference. And they tend to die for one of two reasons. Someone with influence decrees they’re done: “A food writer or reviewer goes ‘If I see truffle oil on one more dish, I’m gonna die’. Then everyone goes, ‘oh, Jesse Mulligan’s spoken, you can’t have truffle oil any more.’”

Or they become nauseatingly ubiquitous.

“Once everyone’s doing it, we don’t want to do it.”

Some trends aren’t bad, they just have an image problem. While he used to think pesto was the height of culinary sophistication, Brown wouldn’t dream of putting it on a modern menu.

“If I use fresh basil, with pine nuts, lemon juice and olive oil on something, it’s basically the same thing. It’s just the word pesto sounds so nineties.”

But some rebrands he scorns.

“So much is in the naming of dishes. A ‘poke bowl’ is essentially a salad with raw fish, a ‘wellness bowl’ is basically a bowl of cereal, but with pretty piles of berries and fruit and ‘Greek’ yoghurt and some weird or exotic sounding seed like chia to make it sound interesting.

“When I grew up, a fruit muffin was a bran muffin. And then people took the word muffin and made white chocolate and raspberry muffins. That’s not a muffin, it’s f…ing cake.”

The rise and fall of a food fad

Of all the past decades’ food fads, spirulina smoothies must be the most inexplicable. Truly a feat of marketing genius - turn a glass of green muck that’s a cousin to toxic algae into a fashion accessory. (See also kale.)

Spirulina was apparently first appreciated by the Aztecs, who harvested it from lakes and called it tecuitlatl, which translates as “rock excrement”.

It’s also in the same cyanobacteria family as the toxic blue-green blooms that appear in lakes and rivers over summer, killing dogs.

But neither of those facts appeared in early promos for the green “food of the future”.

That’s from an ad that appeared in The Press newspaper back in 1981, proclaiming it “the most nutritious food on the planet”. Because it’s high in protein and minerals, NASA investigated it as a supplement for astronauts. “Spirulina is the ideal space food since man can live on small quantities for years and years,” the ad enthuses.

In 1995, spirulina pops up in our archives as a cure for hangovers. By 1997, spirulina smoothies are so widespread that their absence is noted as a mark of a small town’s isolation. And in 1998, it made the top 10 supermarket buys of then ACT leader Richard Prebble’s wife Doreen.

University of Melbourne food scientist, associate professor Senaka Ranadheera, says the spirulina craze was probably fuelled by two things - the endless (and often unscientific) pursuit of healthy food, and what he calls performative eating.

“You might not like to drink spirulina smoothies, but you might do it, or keep them in your hand while walking, just to impress others.”

But there’s nothing new about food evolution, Ranadheera says. From the shift from hunter gatherer diets to farmed animals and crops, to the flavour revolution brought by the spice trade, humans have been forever adapting to new food trends.

“We have been influencing others through foods we eat for hundreds of years…affected by factors such as trade, technological advancements, cultural exchange, economic shifts and modern media.”

Innovations such as canning and pasteurisation enabled more long-life foods, and ready-to-eat meals. And there have always been influencers. Before social media, they were food mags, chefs, critics, as well as celebrity endorsers. Now, it’s anyone on the internet who can push our viral buttons.

Instafad and FoodTok

Remember viral baked feta pasta? At the centre of the maze of belated pretenders, the source appears to be a February 2019 post by Finnish food blogger Liemessa, which was rebooted in 2021 with tweaks by American vlogger Grilled Cheese Social.

Tomatoes, garlic, feta and zero preparation - what’s not to love? But is anyone still making it?

Once the hype dulls, whether a trend endures comes down to taste, health, convenience, cultural connection or sustainability, Ranadheera says.

Is matcha a stayer? What about non-dairy milk, fermented everything, or activated charcoal (whatever that means)?

For all the fads, some flavours never get old, says Brown. And everywhere doesn’t necessarily mean bad.

“I see food writers saying, ‘Oh, every menu has a ceviche dish’. Well, isn't that lovely, if we can have access to beautiful, fresh fish, and our cuisine is light and tasty and healthy like that?

“Tomato, basil, olive oil on a bruschetta will be done long after we’ve gone, and it’s been done for hundreds of years before. So classics are classics.”

One thing that won’t be off Brown’s table are those mini fish burgers.

“I can’t take the slider off the menu at Depot, because for better or worse, it’s our signature. All my cheffing life and that’s what it came down to - this little hamburger. It feels a bit sad,” he laughs.

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