Tiramisu. Crème brûlée. Chocolate mousse. You’re not alone if you think Australia’s restaurant dessert menus look eerily similar these days.

“I’ve talked about this a lot with my pastry girlfriends,” says Victoria Lennard, former head pastry chef at Attica in Melbourne, who now holds the same role at Restaurant Botanic in Adelaide. “Every time we would go out for dinner, we would always just get tiramisu.” Lennard and her friends aren’t die-hard tiramisu fans, she says – usually there’s just nothing more compelling on the menu.

Andy Bowdy, pastry chef at Ace Hotel Sydney, shares the sentiment. He recalls recent restaurant meals where dessert has felt like an afterthought: “You see all this effort in the savoury courses, and then it’s like a scoop of ice-cream with a little bit of oil on it.”

But we can’t blame pastry chefs for the vanilla-fication of desserts.

Pastry teams were often the first to be let go during the pandemic and many restaurants never rebuilt them. Pastry chefs have been an endangered species since, with regular chefs left to cobble together dessert menus – something that requires largely different skills to developing savoury dishes.

Food costs have also risen dramatically post-Covid – and nowhere’s been hit harder than the dessert section, with its heavy reliance on ingredients like butter, eggs, cocoa and vanilla. Butter prices rose at least 24 per cent last year. Adjusted for inflation, eggs are 16 per cent more expensive than in 2020, due to the impact of bird flu. Cocoa is 300 per cent pricier than five years ago, largely due to climate change. And in 2017 and 2023, cyclones devastated Madagascar, which once supplied 80 per cent of the world’s vanilla – sending prices soaring by 2900 per cent.

“There’s a conception that dessert should be under 20 bucks … but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be priced like an entree,” Bowdy says. “ If you want good desserts that are slightly more refined, it involves time … it’s easier to make a couple of ice-creams, a mousse, a little bit of biscuit crumb, as opposed to shaping tuiles or segmenting fruit.”

Restaurants are responding with safer, less-labour intensive desserts, sometimes dressed up with the centuries-old spectacle of tableside, or guéridon, service. See: Ormeggio’s Amalfi lemon gelato with torched meringue, Matteo’s dessert trolley in Sydney, Gimlet’s crepes Suzette and Maison Batard’s chocolate mousse in Melbourne. And, of course, Grill Americano’s tableside tiramisu, a signature since 2022 and now an international phenomenon replicated as far afield as India. The trend is evolving rapidly and other restaurants are putting their own spin on it – like Sydney’s 10 William Street, which recently introduced $3.50 mini spoonfuls of tiramisu, addressing the demand for experience and affordability.

All these desserts satisfy our post-Covid appetite for restaurants that are more experiential; which feel like a night out after so many months stuck in. Then there’s social media. As algorithms prioritise video over images and Tiktok gets more and more popular, dining trends are inevitably favouring movement too.

Alessandro and Anna Pavoni, the power couple behind Ormeggio – plus Postino, Chiosco, A’Mare and Cibaria – say sweets are selling just as well as steak and pasta at their restaurants. They think the key is having desserts that make sense with the restaurant’s concept. “If you’ve got classic Italian, you finish with classic Italian,” Anna says.

She also says there’s a level of obsession around gelato and tiramisu that helps move these particular dishes. She’s had customers who follow tiramisu around Sydney, determined to try every version in the city. And the team has had success riffing on the classics, swapping out traditional tiramisu for a pistachio version at Postino and a hazelnut take at Cibaria.

Bowdy’s had to learn how to balance innovation with familiarity and comfort. “It used to drive me crazy when I’d create complex desserts and our best-seller would be a sundae,” he says. But he’s embraced it. The peanut butter and banana sundae he introduced at Hartsyard is now a signature, and went on to reappear at Kiln and spawn a collaboration with Gelato Messina.

But if the restaurant world is tough, it’s led to a new wave of pastry chefs striking out on their own with specialty shops. In Sydney, Pantry Story’s Mutiara Putri Sucipto and Hari Wibowo serve playful creations like bright purple ube-banana muffins prepared in the style of Filipino ensaymadas. And in Melbourne, Dinner by Heston’s former head pastry chef Gareth Whitton makes expertly layered tarts at Tarts Anon; Coda’s former head pastry chef Joanne Yeoh churns some of Melbourne’s best ice-cream at Kori; Attica Summer Camp’s ex-pastry chef Rosemary Andrews makes eight-layer carrot cakes at Mietta by Rosemary; and former Matilda and Sunda chef Rong Yao Soh and his partner Hyoju Park, formerly Attica’s head pastry chef, craft creative madeleines filled with mugwort, a Korean herb, at Madeleine de Proust.

That’s not to say restaurants can’t push boundaries. Kay-Lene Tan of Melbourne’s Yugen and Omnia makes unconventional kueh (Southeast Asian desserts). Rhiann Mead, who looks after all things pastry for the Sydney group behind The Charles, experiments with fruity jellies and lollies. Aoife Noonan of Sydney’s Prefecture 48 makes delicate, sculptural creations like spiralised apple and almond entremets. Bowdy serves a golden, Thai sticky rice-inspired fritter crowned with perfectly sliced mango alongside bigger crowd-pleasers at Ace, and uses his platform to experiment with less common ingredients like shiso and bee pollen. And Lennard sees Restaurant Botanic’s set menu format – which celebrates native Australian ingredients – as a chance to introduce diners to new flavours like peppermint gum pavlova or Kakadu plum pâté de fruit with gulbanyi tea sherbet and black tyrant ants.

“If it was à la carte, you’d be worried people are going to avoid it,” she says. “But when we give [guests] something that they’ve never tried before, they’re a little bit nervous, but they’re willing to try it.”