Photo by Mari Helin on Unsplash

Trend to Table: After Peak Tinned Fish, Vegetables Step Into the Can

12 Minute read

14 Oct 2025

Kiki Aranita

Journalist

Copy link

From sardines to squash, a new generation of chefs and producers are rethinking what belongs in a tin—and on the restaurant menu.

Tugging the tabs back on the silver tins revealed perfectly ordered rows of evenly diced vegetables, jigsawed into edible mosaics. With chopsticks, I lifted cubes of Row 7’s Honeypatch Squash and Badger Flame Beets—glossy in extra-virgin olive oil, labeled as designer vegetables—from their tins. I teased apart the stems and leaves of Sweet Garleek, bathed in white balsamic vinegar and Dijon mustard, each one packed with such precision it felt impossible they weren’t arranged by hand. Without their paper sleeves, I might have mistaken them for any of the tinned fish in my pantry.

“They’re outrageously tasty,” declared my husband, chef Ari Miller, who uses all of these vegetables in his kitchen in their fresh form. They aren’t just beautiful and flavorful—they feel new. For a moment, we looked at each other, confused. When had vegetables ever been processed like this? And then, of course, the realization: change the shape of the tin and we all grew up with canned beans, pumpkin, corn, and other vegetables. But these taste nothing like those.

Could this be how the world evolves from tinned-fish madness?

From Pantry Aisles to Restaurant Plates

Over twenty-five years ago, when Gabrielle Hamilton put tinned sardines and Triscuits on the menu at her New York restaurant, Prune, it did the equivalent of breaking the internet—had the internet been as robust back then. I first read about that not-quite-a-dish in 2012, in Hamilton’s memoir Blood, Bones & Butter, a few years before I became a chef, and I remember thinking: How could you possibly charge money, in a restaurant, for something anyone could buy in a store? You’re not doing anything to it.

The lack of manipulation has both irked and fascinated me ever since. It made me question what qualifies as “chef work”—what earns a place on a menu.

Tinned fish, or conservas—and even the beloved Spam musubi of my childhood and my former restaurant, Poi Dog—have always been here, quietly providing nonperishable nourishment. The recent mania for conservas is a convergence of circumstances: the pandemic (when we were all stocking our pantries), the boom in travel to Portugal (I’m writing this still jet-lagged from Lisbon), and the irresistible aesthetics of brands like Fishwife, the gateway drug that turned countless Americans into sardine eaters.

You can’t escape tinned fish now. It’s as pervasive as a Staud beaded handbag on Instagram—part fashion statement, part culinary affectation—and the tins themselves have become cultural currency. The New York Times’ Wirecutter, Bon Appétit, and countless others (including this publication) have breathlessly ranked the best of them. Fancy Portuguese tins have even made their way into the vending machine at Philadelphia cocktail bar Next of Kin, and appear alongside charcuterie at cafés like Musette.

I’m not writing about tinned fish to beat you over the head with this inescapable trend, but to ask: where do we go from here, if “here” is peak tinned fish?

Bar Siesta's Matrimonio. Credit: Emily Ferreti

Spain’s Conservas Culture Finds a New Home

Lucia Flors of Los Angeles’ Bar Siesta is part of a new wave of restaurateurs turning the tinned-fish trend into a lifestyle. Together with her husband, Carlos Leiva, and partner Heather Sperling—who also co-owns Botanica Restaurant and Market—Flors founded the concept as an extension of their conservas company, Siesta Co.

Flors and Leiva are both physicians who launched their tinned-fish brand during the pandemic, a time when home pantries became symbols of both comfort and creativity. What began as a consumer product soon evolved into a full-fledged restaurant. In a role reversal from the usual pattern—where chefs spin off products after their restaurants succeed—they built a restaurant around their tins.

“We serve them very simply, like in Spain,” Flors told me over the phone. “We open the conservas and serve them with pan con tomate, mojo verde, a little lemon, and crackers. We don’t transfer them to bowls. Mostly, we just open the tin—and there’s the bread and crackers.” I imagined her shrugging, illustrating how effortless it all seemed.

Some of Siesta’s tins—like peppers stuffed with white tuna—are heated and served warm at the bar, but Flors said most wine bars that stock Siesta products serve them straight from the tin.

Between 2010 and 2015, Flors explained, Spain experienced a small revolution of bars devoted entirely to conservas. “Usually fish, but some vegetables in glass jars,” she said. “People started to realize that these were delicacies. Before, we thought of them as emergency food. Chefs like Ferran Adrià supported them, and they were everywhere. Now, in the U.S., after the pandemic, we’re starting to see the same. People realized how easy it was to open a tin.”

Row 7 Branded Produce and Ready to Eat Vegetables

Dan Barber’s Vision for the Future of the Tin

Flors noted that the key to conservas’ popularity in Spain was simple: people realized the food went into the tins at its absolute peak, whether fish or vegetables. That same principle lies behind the almost bewilderingly delicious tins from Row 7 Seeds, though the idea’s origins were more restaurant than factory—and they may eventually find their way back onto restaurant menus.

Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Family Meal at Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York, and co-founder of Row 7 Seeds, told me over the phone, “[Row 7 Seeds] became a kind of Ellis Island for all these rejected and ignored varieties of seeds. Then eventually, we became a produce company and grew these incredible vegetables at scale. And then it became very clear to me that there’s a moment when all these vegetables are really at their peak, whether they’re grown on the West Coast, Midwest, or Southeast Coast. There’s a week or two weeks when they’re really singing with flavor.”

Barber has long recognized and celebrated that fleeting peak in his restaurants, but it took several years of working with Row 7 for the larger idea to crystallize. “For twenty, thirty years, I’ve been canning, dehydrating, and doing all the things—pickling, fermenting, preserving all around,” he said. “All of a sudden I looked up one day while canning at the restaurant and thought: well, if I’m canning and serving up a can of vegetables to diners paying $500 per person, why couldn’t we also do this at scale? These vegetables don’t need to be precious and expensive. They can be affordable.”

“Why does canning have to taste like reject food? How did we allow the reputation of canning to become the lowest common denominator for vegetables?” Barber asked.

That question led to the birth of Row 7’s tinned-vegetable line, which quietly pre-launched earlier this year. The tins sold out almost immediately at the Whole Foods locations where they debuted, with a broader release planned for 2026.

“We’re trying to turn canning on its head,” he said. “It’s currently the sleepiest, most unattractive aisle in the grocery store.”

Working with a new canning copacker, Barber has been refining time and temperature to create a shelf-stable product that, as he put it, “doesn’t batter the vegetables into submission.” In his hands—or cans, rather—the vegetables retain both their integrity and their nutritional value. He’s democratizing the harvest, he said, just in a different aisle.

When I asked Barber whether he could imagine other restaurants serving his tins alongside their charcuterie boards, he paused.

“No one has ever asked me that,” he said, “but I think the answer is yes. As labor gets more expensive, chefs still want to serve deliciousness.”

The American obsession with tinned fish may have overlooked vegetables, but it’s also cleared a path for them. In the process, it’s reframed what we consider worthy of a menu—and who gets to define it.

As Barber put it, “We’ve lost our way, but now we have an exciting opportunity. American culture has opened their minds to the tin.”