Before you complain about your supermarket bills, consider what you’d spend if you ate out at these restaurants, which serve a $99 hamburger or a $15,900 pie. These dishes take the term ‘fine dining’ to a whole new level, incorporating rare ingredients and complicated cooking techniques, plus a price tag that will pretty much wipe out the average person’s monthly food budget. So here’s the list of the most expensive food in the world. Thankfully, reading about it is free—and so is daydreaming of the day when we can actually spend $1.6 million on our holiday fruitcake. (Yes, there was one.)
1. The $99 hamburger
The DB Bistro Moderne, which is found in Manhattan, serves a Double Truffle Hamburger that costs nearly a hundred dollars. But a close look at the ingredients justifies the price. It has three ounces of rib meat, and sirloin steak stuffed with layers of truffles and foie gras. Those are really expensive ingredients, which make McDonald’s secret sauce sound pretty lame in comparison. This is sandwiched between Parmesan slices and poppy seed bun, and served with salad and truffle shavings.
Needless to say, this hamburger has more cholesterol and fat than you’d care to count. But if you can afford to pay $99 for a sandwich, you can probably afford a really good cardiologist.
2. The $48,750 snack
Caviar—expensive, but most of us can afford a tin now and then. Well, maybe not this variety. A 3.9 pound container of Almas, a kind of Iranian beluga, costs $48,750. The reason? Its rarity. It comes from sturgeons that are 60 to 100 years old, so let’s give the fish eggs a little respect here. They came from critters that were swimming around long before many of us were born.
3. The $15,900 pie
And you thought your Grandmother’s apple pie was out-of-this-world. In 2006, a chef based in England set out to create the most luxurious, the most rare, the most expensive pie in the world.
His inspiration was the traditional steak and mushroom pie, but boy did he take it to the next level. He used Wagyu beef fillet (about $1,000 worth), and the rarest mushrooms in the world: Chinese matsutake. These fungi are so precious that they’re grown in heavily guarded, secret locations (we’d tell you where, but we’d have to kill you afterwards). And while this dish often makes use of red wine, he picked two bottles of 1982 Chateau Mouton Rothschild–that alone cost over $4,000.
Is your mind reeling already? We’re not yet done. The chef also added black truffles and (we kid you not) gold leaf. (What, no diamonds? What a cheap skate.)
4. The $1,000 Omelette
You’ll find this at New York’s Le Parker Meridien Hotel. In essence, it’s a souped up lobster frittata. It uses the meat of an entire lobster, and has generous lashings of caviar. Still, $1,000 seems a little extreme—even if it’s big enough to share.
5. The $28,000 piece of toast
In 1994, Florida resident Diane Duyser sat down to eat what seemed like an ordinary toasted sandwich. Then, she glanced down at the bread and realized that one of the slices seemed to have an image of the Virgin Mary. (Apparently, Mother Mary doesn’t just leave images on coats—she also performs miracles on baked goods.) Diane immediately stopped eating the sandwich and kept the bread for 10 years. Interestingly, it never accumulated any mold.
So is the bread a holy icon? We’d never know, right, but the irony is that Duyser sold it to a casino (goldenpalace.com) for $28,000. There’s just something that sounds really wrong about that, but we gather the Vatican wasn’t interested.
6. The $1,000 sundae
Compared to the $15,900 pie, the $1,000 ice cream sundae almost sounds like a bargain. It’s served at the New York restaurant, Serendipity, and is appropriately named ‘Grand Opulance Sundae.’ It’s made form Tahitian vanilla bean, with generous drizzles of the world’s most expensive chocolate, Amedei Porcelana. Instead of the usual crushed peanuts and cherries, it’s got gold dragets, truffles, 23-karat edible gold leaf, and dessert caviar.
7. The $1,000 pizza
Wow, there are a lot of expensive dishes in Manhattan. If you don’t feel like having a $99 burger (see # 1) you can head over to the Bellissima restaurant, which serves a $1,000 thin crust, 12-inch pizza. Its toppings include lobster, six kinds of caviar, crème fraîche, and chives.
8. The $197 club sandwich
Consider this the King of Clubs. The Cliveden House Hotel, found near London, serves a decadent sandwich that sells at $197. It uses the finest Iberico ham that’s been cured for 30 months, white truffles, quail eggs, and semi-dried Italian tomatoes, and served on 24-hour fermented sourdough bread.
Sounds good. At $197 it better be—especially since it weighs less than a pound.
9. The $1,600,000 fruitcake
A Tokyo pastry chef designed this cake for a special exhibit entitled ‘Diamonds: Nature’s Miracle. The cake itself was, well, pretty good—but the crowning glory was the bejeweled crust. Instead of glazed fruits or walnuts, this fruitcake had 223 small diamonds (count them, 223!) which takes the phrase ‘icing on the cake’ to a whole new level.