While Italian cuisine is celebrated around the world, the new generations are changing eating habits between poké, sushi, kebab and fast food. Numbers, fashions and consumption tell the story of the rise of ethnic cuisine and the progressive move away from Italian gastronomic traditions
The week of Italian cuisine in the world is once again celebrated with great fanfare (from 16 to 22 November) with great effort and pomp from the Farnesina. They also polish the silverware to highlight the fact that one year ago (10 December) we received recognition from UNESCO as an intangible heritage of humanity.
All very good, but there is a though. Our local cuisine has become foreign to Italians, especially to “generation Z”, the digital natives who number 8.6 million in our country. Other than “Z”: it’s the “poké generation”! They don’t eat native foods because no one prepares them for them, gentrification with the multiplication of “calorie dealers” in urban centers has lowered the quality and completely dispersed the gastronomic identity while raising prices significantly, they know nothing or almost nothing about our cuisine because the trend of ethnic food makes them feel like citizens of the world. It’s nostalgic to listen to the appeals of those who invoke grandmothers’ food! Today’s grandmothers are the last baby boomers: 16 million ladies who know how to prepare a fried egg no matter what. They lived in ’77, they are the daughters of the “deportees” from the countryside to the factories who had no transmission of gastronomic thought. The great-great-grandmother would serve.
It would perhaps be more urgent to organize the week of Italian cuisine in Italy than abroad. To the point that Tommaso Mazzanti, the creator of Antico Vinaio, has opened all over the world and sells his Florentine flatbread with ham and a glass of Sangiovese to foreigners for 90 million euros, but less and less to our kids. The lack of habit of eating Italian and the substitution that is being made with ethnic cuisine in places where you spend little, you don’t know what you eat, but you feel fashionable has led to a vertical crisis in the restaurant industry. In the last three years – from 2022 to 2025 – 84 thousand restaurants have lowered their shutters. In the current year we have already exceeded 29 thousand closures. And there is further data to take into account: 29.8% of those who work on our tables – around 330 thousand people – are not Italian and today one in eight administration points is managed by non-EU citizens.
It started with pizzerias by the slice, then Chinese restaurants appeared, and finally the kebab colonized the historic centres. Which has become the most consumed street food in Italy: over 70% – the data comes from Amagi-Norstat – have consumed it at least once. The “kebabbari”, a term not yet cleared by Crusca but which brings together Millennial mothers with “Z” children, number just under 5 thousand and some chains do a roaring trade, but there are also Italian operators who have launched themselves into this business.
The most “colourful” is undoubtedly Gianluca Vacchi, who set out to conquer the market by opening sales points everywhere for his Kebhouze. Result: in the first five years it lost 12 and a half million euros. Why? Its prices are considered too high. The “kebabbari” are almost all franchised and are supplied by wholesalers who sell ready-made frozen skewers, but to put it in an advertisement, “their strength is the price”. The quality is up for debate. The seizures of goods are multiplying (Parma, Sulmona, Teramo, Viadana, Fermo, Vibo Valentia, Jesolo, Salerno to name the most recent operations of the NAS), but the market is expanding at the same pace. A kebab shop can earn up to 1,500 euros a day, at a European level the turnover of kebabs exceeds 10 billion with portions that hardly cost more than 7 euros.
Leaving the kebab behind, here is a new frontier of street food that characterizes Generation Z or rather P for poké. Those who consume it ignore its origins. It is a poor dish of Hawaiian fishermen: created to recycle waste fish and mix it with what is found. A Pacific fish! The debut in Italy is very recent: the first poké was served in 2017 by I Love Poké in Milan. Since then it has been an unstoppable growth. It is estimated that today in Italy there are over 820 points of sale; the relative majority is of two chains: I Love Poké itself, with 150 points of sale (about fifty in franchising), and Poke House, with around eighty “tables”. The idea of the small retailers who have more than half of the market in their hands, however, was to equate the service of poké to that of ice cream: basically there is rice or salad, then you make up the “bowl” with whatever you want. Generation P’s three favorite flavors are salmon, avocado and edamame, i.e. unripe soybeans.
However, the explosion of the Hawaiian dish occurred with Covid. It is one of the foods that best lends itself to delivery and the figures confirm this. In 2021 bowls were sold for less than 90 million, in 2022 it reached 328 million euros, this year the turnover will exceed 700 million euros. The success is given by a vague perception of health, by the ease and speed of preparation, by the fact that it has almost become a lifestyle and that it is an intergenerational food. If for the P generation it is a distinctive trait, for the parents all gym and little gastronomic commitment it is the ideal “sketch”. Also relatively cheap given that with 12, maximum 15 euros, you can get a complete meal.
Other numbers give a sense of the success of this non-dish dish: last year Glovo distributed 3.3 million bowls (almost 9 thousand portions per day with a year-on-year increase of 192 percent); Just Eat sold 370 tonnes of poké made up of 167 tonnes of avocado, 112 tonnes of salmon and 70 tonnes of soya beans.
But poké is also the best ally of another rapidly growing food: sushi. Very little is truly Japanese. There are 4,600 Japanese style restaurants (very often managed by Chinese, perhaps in the now well-known “all you can eat” formula), the authentic ones do not reach 2,400 (data from the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture), the absolute quality ones are no more than 100 including some stars such as Nobu in Milan, Hamasei in Rome. On the other hand, however, we eat 714 tons of sushi (2025 data and relating only to delivery orders) with an average expense of 46 euros for approximately 170 million in turnover and a share of regular consumers of the Japanese dish that exceeds three million families.
The fact that the ethnic component dominates among the places that are popping up like mushrooms in big cities is another example: fried chicken. Not the one with grandma’s breading, but the American fast food model. The KFC (Kentucky fried chicken) chain has planned to bring its turnover in Italy to 281 million euros, an increase of 22% compared to 2025, confirming our country as one of the most dynamic markets in the world. A month ago one of their shops in Modena promised free meals for life to anyone who got their logo tattooed. Very long lines of kids.
The golden wings are very popular and even the son of chef Joe Bastianich, Ethan, has opened the first location of the Texan Wingstop chain in Milan (the plan includes 50 openings in Italy).
Fashion, perhaps. The “bubble tea” parable is an example of this. They are those drinks originating in Taiwan with tea, milk and tapioca pearls, i.e. colored spheres to pop between your teeth. Likewise, some chains of the instagrammable drink have gone “pop”, having entered into crisis after their success. On the other hand, bubble teas are now found in large-scale retail trade under other names. When it comes to the market.
The trend is also very certified. The latest Nestlé-Adi report entitled The Ageless Age in focus on young people between 18 and 34 years old found that over 74% love ethnic cuisine. In first place come American meatball fast food (in this context the latest strong trend is “smash burgers”: meatballs smashed forcefully on a hot plate, rather than pre-shaped), then Chinese, Japanese and Mexican cuisine.
What is most worrying, however, are eating habits: at least two meals skipped a week with 36% believing that eating is only a physical necessity and for 25% the best table companion is the mobile phone.
With all due respect to the UNESCO motivation for Italian cuisine as a cultural and convivial expression. Claude Lévi-Strauss would say that these are the new “gustemi”, the (a)gastronomic language of the new generations who destroy tradition (and perhaps there are those who are interested in this happening) with all due respect to Gianfranco Vissani, who in the face of the crisis of the so-called fine dining restaurants made an appeal to the “starred” ones: “Either we return to tradition or it closes”. Ultimately, to quote an old jingle, “enough poké what do I want?”.
