The New Wave of Food Decor Wants You to Eat It

The table looks good enough to eat. On Instagram, Salt Lake City-based artist Kamber Carroll has been sharing videos of himself turning thick pieces of foam coated with resin into what looks like a giant’s portion of pancakes, but functions as furniture. He sands the foam’s edges, piling each disk and painting the pieces to resemble a fluffy golden stack. Syrupy resin drips down the sides, filmed in close-up to mimic the food reels that monopolize our social media feeds. At the end of the clip, the simulacrum is reversed and compounded: Carroll makes a stack of edible pancakes and serves them atop the table they inspired.

Carroll hasn’t stopped at pancakes: he’s made a coffee cup table with swirls of crema in the surface and a waffle table with uneven browns that evoke the heat of a waffle iron. Call it the second wave of food decor, which isn’t solely peddling in reference, but maximizes both realism and wonder.

While the last few years have seen a swell in popularity for food-themed decor, it wasn’t always such an easy sell. In 2019, when Helena Barquet and Fabiana Faria began stocking Australian homeware brand Third Drawer Down’s corn stool at Coming Soon, their Manhattan shop that has become synonymous with eccentric, high-quality design, the reception was cooler. "It was a slow build for the corn," Faria says. "In the beginning people thought we were nuts," Barquet adds, "and then it just grew. It has a magic quality to it." Now, the cheeky corn stool with the bite taken out of it is everywhere—a shorthand for our growing hunger for food off the plate, whether it’s a candle on our table or a print on our dresses.

As home cooks proliferated during and after lockdown, food culture became further imbricated with popular culture. Dinner parties and tablescapes trended, blurring the lines between pantry staples and design objects, and solidifying food art as pop art. Lamps look like tomatoes, strawberries inspire side tables and stained glass art, and cabbageware made a comeback. On TikTok, clips of Ukrainian artist Christina Kunanets smearing the baked goods in her hyperrealistic, textured oil paintings with what looks like cake frosting or cream cheese rack up millions of views. Montreal multidisciplinary artist Gab Bois turns actual food into miniature furniture, using brioche buns to recreate Mario Bellini’s Camaleonda sectional on Instagram, and piecing together life-size chandeliers made from grapes and candy canes.

In recent years, the rise of the Shoppy Shop—a term coined by designer Neil Shankar on TikTok to describe curated provisions stores stocked with internet-favorite direct-to-consumer brands like Graza, Fishwife, and Omsom—has also turned grocery shopping into something closer to boutique shopping. Home cooks can grip their pot handles with silicone farfalloni, serve dinner at tables lit by fusilli candles, and afterward lounge against tortellini throw pillows. At Coming Soon, Barquet and Faria explain, they have gone from stocking Ichendorf Milano glasses adorned with animals to Ichendorf Milano glasses with miniature avocados and cherries. "Food is everywhere," Barquet says. "Even when we’re not eating it, we’re looking at it!"

The foodification of everything from our clothes and makeup to our couches, lamps, and paint colors is, at this point, well established. But newer culinary-inspired objects are becoming even more lifelike. Gohar World, a fantastical "tableware universe" run by sisters Laila and Nadia Gohar, for example, makes craggy fried chicken wing candles that, at first glance, could easily be mistaken for the real thing, and have become one of the most popular gift items at Coming Soon. "There’s a novelty to that hyperreal look, the ability to make them look that real," says Barquet. "I don’t remember seeing candles quite that realistic before." Gohar World’s haute frivolity also extends to a silk Baguette Bag covered in bows, perfectly sized to carry an actual loaf, as well as lace "dresses" for eggs and paper "slippers" for chicken wings that look like upside-down chef hats.

Candles have become a particularly popular venue for food decor, thanks in part to the ease of casting atypical shapes, and their relatively low price point. Gohar World’s website has a dedicated Food Candles page with handmade wax seafood platters, mushrooms, and sausage links, and Barquet and Faria recently added a toast candleholder by St. Louis design studio Collin Garrity to Coming Soon’s selection. The bread-shaped ceramic has a recessed square in the center for a beeswax tea light that melts like a pat of butter as it burns, offering a new level of realism, a new angle to the joke. The shop also carries Heirloom Tomato candles by Los Angeles-based brand Scandles that are "molded off the real thing" and smell like the green leaves of a tomato vine. (Last year, similarly scented candles and products saw a massive uptick thanks to so-called "tomato girl summer.")

The punchline and the fake-out are crucial elements of the popularity of these items, say Barquet and Faria, who mention that a wine bottle-shaped Gohar World candle on display at their store is pocked with tiny half-moons from fingernails probing its veracity. "We can never sell that one," Faria says with a laugh. This blurring of reality is part of the fun, of course. There’s an is it or isn’t it? aspect to Carroll’s syrup-covered pancake table and tomato candles that look and smell like the real food. "There’s a cleverness to it, like when you were a kid and you had those fake spills, like the Pepsi—I was obsessed with them," says Barquet. (Brooklyn fine jewelry and home goods brand Mociun sells a variety of handmade faux food and drink spills, from condiment packets to cocktails, for those who love that gag.) 

The pleasure, it seems, is in the realization of the error: that moment you hungrily grab for the wax tomato, briefly convincing yourself it might yield to your fingers, and then your teeth. On Instagram, it recently took me three watches to realize that pastry designer Dinara Kasko was making a cake out of a pillow mold, not the other way around. Meanwhile, TikTokers are making "wall cakes" out of cardboard and spackle. Food has become decor, and decor has become food.

That conflation is perhaps most present in Apt. 2 Bread founder Carla Finley’s breadware mirrors, which fall into the "bread art" niche of food decor. Finley, who launched her bakery from her Brooklyn apartment after being laid off from a restaurant job in 2020, started off by selling typical loaves and rolls, but two years ago, when planning a photo shoot and fundraiser with a friend, she wove some dough into a basket and baked it. (It still sits in her apartment.) Next, she made a faux window with bread baked around a glass pane. "After that, the obvious next move was the mirror, and everyone was like, oh my god!" Finley says. She began posting her dough-wrapped mirrors on Instagram and the orders poured in. Sometimes she lacquers the finished bread with resin epoxy and sometimes she leaves them rough.

For Finley, the mirrors are special for their ability to preserve a loaf of bread and memorialize its baking. "I feel connected to bread because it’s such an ancient form of creating," she says. "Bread has always been a part of human lives, and being able to mark it in time is really special."

Finley has since played with other forms of dough designs, like ornate holiday wreaths. But her personal favorite piece is a simple, a two-year-old baguette wrapped in string and hung above her bed that she likens to a dream catcher. "Typically, we just consume bread, but if you’re placing it up on the wall, taking a step back, and having a moment with that piece, it’s another way to look at our relationship with food, to cherish it," she says. "And it’s also kind of camp." 

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