The huge appetite for miniature cuisine

A stack of pancakes, each one the size of a 20-cent piece. A burger that’s literally bite-sized. Steaming ramen in a tiny bowl that takes a couple of thimblefuls of broth. And all of it prepared using miniature pots, pans and utensils on dolls house-size stoves powered by tealights.

No, you haven’t accidentally taken psychedelics and entered an episode of The Twilight Zone. This Lilliputian world is the very real – and very popular – manifestation of a trend for small cuisine that’s racking up millions of views on websites, social-media platforms and YouTube channels.

Unsurprisingly, the craze started in Japan where a love of all things tiny and “kawaii” (cute) is a long-standing tradition in art and crafts. Japanese YouTube channel Miniature Space, with nearly 3.5 million subscribers worldwide, was a pioneer: one of its most popular videos, which shows a strawberry shortcake being made using a single berry, has been viewed more than 12.5 million times.

Kate Murdoch, the British chef/presenter of current viral sensation Tiny Kitchen (a series made by US food group Tastemade), says that the portions and volumes used are so small that “water takes less than a minute to boil and burgers need only a few seconds on each side to cook”. Also, the painstaking, step-by-step process behind the eensy-weensy preparations means a two-minute video can take many hours to film. “It’s hard explaining what I do to people my parents’ age,” she has admitted.

Meanwhile, fellow “miniac” Jay Baron has also helped popularise miniature cooking with his much-loved series, Walking with Giants. “To be honest, I’m kind of weird, so I just want to be happy being weird,” he says on YouTube. There’s something hypnotic – and addictive – about watching human hands manipulate scaled-down knives (they’re smaller than a pinky finger) to chop slivers of baby carrot, or seeing minuscule chicken chunks braise on Borrower-size skewers (they’re smaller than toothpicks). Psychologists suggest these videos elicit an autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), a pleasant, tingling sensation in the brain that relaxes us.

Little wonder, then, that as the pandemic has swept the globe, causing our own worlds to shrink, these videos have exploded in popularity. In stressful times, it seems, there’s a huge appetite for tiny servings.

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