Some dishes become so ingrained in culture that it's hard to imagine there was a time they were barely known, but prior to the 1980s, Italian food was considered "ethnic," food was mostly reserved for working class immigrants and their families or a specialty of a few regional enclaves like New York.
It was in that decade that then-novel dishes like risotto broke through the ideas most Americans had about Italian food and pushed it into the larger world of fine dining. With that, tiramisu became the U.S.'s most popular dessert of the decade.
Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/2068464/popular-italian-dessert-80s-tiramisu/
