Everything Sucks. At Least There Are Jalapeño Poppers.

Welcome to the LOLfood era, where as the world burns, the beautiful eat pizza rolls

The pizza rolls on the menu really sealed it for me. I’d seen other inklings that food these days was trending a little comfort first, brain second. But perusing the menu of the buzzy Corner Store and seeing five cheese pizza rolls served with ranch solidified my instinct that something was up, and just made me cackle out loud. I think that’s the point. It was already goofy that one of Manhattan’s hottest new bars was run by the guys behind Houlihans, but putting straight-up pizza rolls on the menu — not pizza rolls with locally made cheese, not pizza rolls with a Korean influence, basically just... Totino’s — is just so damn funny. And everywhere I looked there was another dish made of our simplest, sincerest, college party dreams.

At Corner Store you can also snack on spinach artichoke dip like you’re at a Super Bowl party. In Brooklyn, Blue Hour serves its take on a Taco Bell Crunchwrap out of a gas station, and at the sleek and sophisticated Time and Tide, there’s a giant honking Goldfish cracker. At Portland’s Take Two you can get jalapeño popper arancini and waffle fries smothered in Bolognese. Wen Wen served a truly obscene chicken Parm sandwich in Taiwan, christening it “stupid food.” Chicago’s Void serves “Spaghetti Uh-Os” out of a can, tableside. Los Angeles’s Evil Cooks makes a “McSatan” bacon cheeseburger taco. Chain threw a whole festival celebrating winky riffs on fast food. Everywhere has a smash burger, and on TikTok, everyone just wants to find the best chicken Caesar wrap and eat it out of their car.

Americans have never not wanted things like mozzarella sticks and chicken tenders. But lately there has been an air of fervor around the simple, the lightly childish, the don’t-make-me-think-too-hard foods. The reverence for craft, artisanal, personal foods has led to a certain exhaustion with fussiness, and an embrace of what is good and uncomplicated. We don’t want to be challenged. We don’t want to think. We just want to laugh at the sheer stupidity when we see the menu. This is LOLfood.

Margaret Eby, author and deputy food editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, noted that during a recent service at the new “dinner party” restaurant Scampi, the chef brought out hot dogs. “She intuitively understood that people want this beautiful handmade pasta that you went to Sicily and studied for, plus a hot dog,” she said. Scampi’s website looks like a ’90s 8-bit game, and serving a hot dog next to handmade tortelli is nothing short of a punchline. “When you present someone with something that’s so connected to barbecues and baseball games and just chilling out, it activates this pleasure center. Like oh, we’re having fun.”

It’s all comfort food, but with a slightly trolling “lol wouldn’t it be funny” edge; fun is always at the forefront. Much like the 2000s lolcat internet memes, this isn’t about making smart jokes. It’s about the most basic humor that still gets a laugh.

“At the very beginning we knew that we wanted some, pardon the pun, cheesy classics on the menu,” says Blake Foster, owner and operator of Gabbiano’s in Portland, which opened in 2022 and serves mozzarella stick shot glasses filled with marinara. Nicknamed “shotzarellas,” they were the perfect combination of straightforwardly goofy and earnestly good. According to co-owner Heather Wallberg, Gabbiano’s served 29,000 individual cups last year.

At Time and Tide, chef Danny Garcia says the Big Goldfish is about playing with the memories and associations customers are already coming in with. “It’s incredibly special when you can sit down at a restaurant and bite into something, and it takes you back to a place as a kid,” he says. The giant cracker is obviously a reference to the snack that smiles back — he says he and pastry chef Renata Ameni saw mini Goldfish, and thought how funny it would look in the opposite direction. But he says Time and Tide in general is also “pulling a lot of strings from Red Lobster.” The cracker evokes the chain’s famous Cheddar Bay Biscuits, made with Old Bay butter and chives. For him, the fun is in being unpretentious. “I want to cook food that is approachable, but it’s also fun and delicious.”

Dani Kaplan, co-chef of Void, says the Spaghetti Uh-Os are also all about sparking “a kind of Proustian nostalgia, a familiarity of a time and place, while presenting a dish that is reimagined and elevated.” It hits the marks of fine dining — hand-rolled pasta Os, poured tableside, evocative of a properly made Caesar salad — but the familiarity it’s assuming is not with other fine dining experiences. It’s with cheap, canned pasta for children.

Every trend is a reaction masquerading as a new idea. And we have had so many reactions over the past 15 or so years. Essentially, mass food trends ping between two different tracks — the comfort and the craft. Back in 2009, the recession caused everything to veer lowbrow. Every fine dining restaurant put a burger on the menu, and no dish was complete without bacon. It was an era of Epic Meal Times and KFC Double Downs, interspersed with lolcats asking if they can haz cheesburgers. But the rise of YouTube and the embrace of home cooking as a cost saver soon led to a homemade, artisanal boom, offering the idea that maybe snack foods made by international conglomerates weren’t the be-all-end-all of flavor. Think Portlandia, with every restaurant giving you the life story of your heritage chicken and serving you house-made charcuterie.

Ping, over to the poptimism of the late teens, rejecting again the persnickety craft movement, with the reconsideration (or not) of Guy Fieri and all things unpretentious. Pong, to everyone developing parasocial relationships with the stars of the Bon Appétit test kitchen, and then, bolstered by COVID lockdown, making sourdough and growing their own scallions. Ping to chaos cooking, wild mashups of every cuisine that speaks to a chef’s specific tastes, big and brash yes, but still something you had to think about and engage with to get the full story.

And now, pong. Fuck that, LOLfood says. Actually, Taco Bell rules just as it is, and I’d rather eat spaghetti and meatballs (or Spaghetti Uh-Os). I want to be amused by the simplest things. Much of the embrace of what food critic Alan Sytsma calls “kids menu food” is a weariness with the excesses of chaos cooking and the general maximalist vibe, the everything everywhere all at once of it. This time, the juxtaposition is what makes it, the amusing image of a hot dog next to a glass of natural wine, the pizza roll in the chic, modern dining room. The setting can be elevated, this trend says, but the food should not be. The martini may be $20, but please, just give me a Goldfish that tastes like Red Lobster.

This is in many ways Maximalism On Recession. It’s a practical response. Then as now, ingredients like potatoes and cheese and bacon were comparatively cheap for restaurants, and guaranteed crowd pleasers, which are needed on menus when diners are ever more cautious about spending. You know you’re going to like shotzarella, even if you’ve never had it before. At its core this is an emotional reaction. “We’re in uncertain times, and this is the time when we crave comfort food,” NPR food commentator Bonny Wolf said in January 2009, noting Gourmet magazine’s cover that month was of spaghetti and meatballs. When dining out, she says, we were “over the era of pretension.”

Uncertain times, eh? There is no shortage of that. “I think the prevailing mood in general has been one of low-key dread,” says Eby, noting worries about the Trump administration and what it means for basically every aspect of life, including the restaurant industry. And when your brain is full up thinking about other, honestly more important things, the things you do for leisure often return to their most basic. “In the same way that sometimes you need to watch a show that’s extremely smooth, that you don’t need to engage with it intellectually, sometimes you need the same thing out of food,” she says.

Foster says the idea for Gabbiano’s first came about during COVID lockdown, when he realized the pod he was in couldn’t stop eating pasta. And not handmade noodles with region-specific sauces, but east coast red sauce pasta, heaping with mozzarella and parmesan. There’s a reason we were all making a big lasagna. “The pandemic has changed. We’ve been able to get out of our homes, but there’s still so much uncertainty and fear and change,” says Wallberg.

Dread and financial precarity means restaurants have to walk the line between offering comfort, but not something so familiar that you could just get it at home. The Big Goldfish, familiar but distinctly not something you can just get at the grocery store, is the perfect example. “We sell 80 of these things at night, everyone is getting this,” says Garcia. “Did we make it to be an Instagram sensation? No, but it just so happened that it’s a very cute thing, and people love to take pictures of it.” That certainly helps.

There is also the fact that “pure foods” and making everything from scratch have now become the realm of trad wives and the reactionary right, nostalgia from a different angle. When anti-vaxxers are fearmongering about seed oils and chugging raw milk, it puts everyone else in a weird position of defending junk food. “I personally do not need to stand up for red dye #3. But there’s an element where it’s just like, leave trans people alone and also let me have Cheetos,” says Eby.

Of course a chicken Parmesan is good no matter what is going on with the world. But there is an edge to LOLfood. It’s not just an embrace of approachability and comfort, but a rejection of everything else. Our own uncertain times have once again led to a side-eyeing of snobbery, and snobbery is anything that whiffs of authority or intellectual pursuit. We only trust restaurant reviews made by people eating out of clamshells in their cars. Anything else is too glossy, too poised.

Any trend centering on comfort of course raises questions about what food is considered comforting, and what is seen as “challenging.” But in America, there’s nothing glossy about a chicken finger, nothing so immediately knowable as a mozzarella stick. Our bullshit meters are high, but there’s no small amount of irony in that fact leading everyone to pizza bites, just as it did in 2009. The ball will ping again — most people live in the middle anyway, craving both quotidian comforts and new-to-them culinary experiences. As Kaplan puts it, “Perhaps this is the moment for this dish, or perhaps there will always be moments for dishes like these.” But for now, enjoy a few more of the cheese and the beef and the ever-so-clever (but very lol) gestures to the elementary school cafeteria menu. They’ll be unavoidable.