Ciao: Tiramisu For Breakfast

And some mornings, when you’re still buried under months of county permitting bottlenecks—two years after the Lahaina fires—you end up pulling a slice of tiramisu out of the walk-in because that’s the only thing standing between you and what feels like another impossible submission deadline. It’s an underhanded move, a small act of self-sabotage: loading your system with sugar and cheese and caffeine when what you really need is clarity, protein, vegetables, a fighting chance. But that quick hit of fuel, that little surge of energy to carry you into the morning punch list, is all you’re after. No time for judgment. No time for intention. Just scarf it down and go.

“Tiramisu” means pick me up, and it always has. The dessert itself is a relatively modern Italian invention—1960s, Veneto region—born in a small restaurant kitchen where cooks layered espresso-soaked ladyfingers with mascarpone and cocoa to revive tired workers at the end of long shifts. Some say it was created for new mothers needing strength; others say it was meant for late-night revelers stumbling toward dawn. Either way, it was designed to wake you up, steady you, and send you back out into the world with just enough sweetness and caffeine to keep going.

But the truth of this morning is that you didn’t just eat dessert for breakfast. You leaned in to the reality of where you are right now: navigating reconstruction, bureaucracy, deadlines stacked on deadlines, all of it wrapped around the simple need to keep showing up. You took the quickest lifeline available and ran. Because that’s what today demanded.

Still—there’s a note you leave for yourself in the quiet part of your mind: Do better the rest of the day. Do better tomorrow morning. Not from guilt, but from care. Because you deserve more than survival-mode breakfasts. You deserve mornings that nourish the woman who is carrying all of this.

And tomorrow, you’ll try again.