Although focaccia bread had been around in Australia for ten years or so (and probably longer in Italian restaurants), the early 1990s is when the focaccia bar began to replace or complement the old-fashioned sandwich bar. In 1992, Ross Gittins wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald:
I hate to admit it, but I’m crazy about the latest food fad, foccaccia [sic]. (I can never pronounce it and I had to get my wife to help me spell it, but I’m crazy about it all the same.)…I live near Glebe Point Road and in just a few months focaccia has become the staple of every caff and coffee shop on the strip. Even our Lebanese takeaway now features foccaccia. For a hungry chap like me, walking to work has become a gastronomic obstacle course.
Focaccia (Ross Gittins’s wife couldn’t spell it either) is an Italian flatbread with ancient origins. Its name comes from the Latin “panis focacius,” meaning “hearth bread”. It’s a reference to the loaves being baked on the hearth as far back as Roman times, although many historians believe the bread predates the Romans and was originally developed by the Etruscans of central Italy.
The earliest references to focaccia in Australia are in the Italian press, and it was no doubt baked at home by post-WWII immigrants. However, in the early 1980s, it began to appear in the occasional restaurant or café. By 1982, described as an “Italian hot bread sandwich”, it was on the menu at the Bayswater Brasserie at Potts Point and the Tropicana in Darlinghurst. By 1988, Italian-owned bakeries in Sydney were doing a brisk trade in their large focaccia loaves.
The rise of the focaccia wasn’t limited to Sydney. According to the Short Black column in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1990, “In Melbourne, king of the coffee bar cities, focaccia is almost passé”. Among the fillings listed for the sandwich at The Craven, in Glebe Point Road, were antipasto, artichoke, prosciutto, ham, mortadella, eggplant, hot or mild salami, garlic butter, chilli and Jarlsberg cheese, at a cost of $2.50 for a half or $5 for a giant whole one. The Tropicana offered tuna or salmon versions.
Like all food trends, the focaccia soon lost its glamour. In 1997, food writer Jill Dupleix proclaimed that the bread that had reigned supreme in Sydney’s cutting-edge cafés in 1985 had become “but a crumb of its former self”. Why?
Was it the Curse of the Filler Alfalfa? Was it the overcooking, drawing out the oil so that it literally fried the outside, turning them into indigestible crispbread. Or was it the focaccia’s natural enemy – the Turkish pide?
The focaccia is still around in sandwich bars, but it’s no longer the hero. Pide, panini, baguettes, Japanese shokupan, wraps, and old-fashioned toasties and doorstops are among the many sandwich choices of the mid-2020s.