Originally published at: Restaurant now offers $200 french fries to accompany their $300 burger | Boing Boing
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Then they fry in pure goose fat, not oil,
Huh? Animal fat isn’t an oil? This sounds like some silly marketing-BS.
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::Slams mug full of vegetable oil down on the bar counter::
Hey, barkeep, that’s not what you told me!
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I guess catering to a handful of rich arseholes who think gold is something you eat is worth the publicity. Still, it’s a popular enough restaurant without having to resort to these stunt dishes.
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Wonder how many $300 burgers wind up in a bus tub/trash?
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Anthony Bourdain has called it “about as edible as Astroglide and made from the same stuff,”
There’s no truffles in truffle oil.
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Oh gilded age, you’re so fucking literal.
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What is with truffles? Like, they taste good and all, but it seems like all you have to do is grate a bunch of rare fungi on a dish and now it’s special. Can you make your fries taste good without all the foofaraw? Thanks.
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You know, it’s fairly common to fry your pommes frites twice – the first time at a lower temperature to cook the potatoes, the second time at a higher temperature to get them golden brown.
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Nobody tends to order such things.
It’s a well worn marketing tactic. The aim is to get headlines about having “the most expensive x” and thus get the restaurant’s name in front of people.
There’s been a bunch of examples where the restaurant didn’t even stock the components to make the damn thing. It’s real common in a certain grade of right off a highway, close to a corporate park “high end” “lounge and bistro” that clogs up a lot of New Jersey and Florida.
This particular restaurant is a bit notorious for cooking up a new iteration of the stunt every couple of months.
The format is always throw piles of truffle and gold leaf on shit.
The other way this pops up is as part of traditional scams. Which seems to be what that Salt Bae douche is up to. Vastly more expensive version of a standard item you can substitute by “mistake”. Drunk or unaware customers can then be threatened into paying if they dispute things.
The most famous location for that in the US is Nello in Manhattan. Where no prices are listed and you’ll get sand bagged with a $250 side salad and $50 bottles of Budweiser.
It’s similar to the bottle service scam. Where they’ll sell you a whole bottle of that classy Vodka you like for like $200 bucks. But then charge you $500 for ice, $500 for mixers and $1k for a server to supposedly pour it.
Places like this survive on a combination of selling a luxury image to people not well enough off to know better or who think it’s impressive to blow that amount of cash for the sake of blowing that amount of cash. And having a very large, typically armed “manager” escort those who push back to an ATM.
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“If you have to ask the prices, then you’re not dumb enough to eat at this establishment.”
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I’ll just have a few of yours.
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“Look, the profits associated with delivering a decent meal for a decent markup is utterly saturated. So what’s I’m proposing is selling three, maybe four, meals a day to the rich idiots who live on this block and will buy handbags for $15,000 just because their peers did” "But the pricing for fries…?" “If we sold spam for $500 it’d sell if it had exclusivity as its image: ‘Anything that expensive must be marvelous!’”
(recently it was discovered that a very fancy restaurant on an island in Washington state was selling part of a chicken for $250 a plate which turned out to be from the local Costco for $5 a whole chicken)
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Somewhere on the Reddits, someone had done a deep dive on the instagrams about these kinds of stunt dishes – and no one orders them – they make it once, get a lot of publicity, and call it a day. I guess they put it on the menu for the same reason Tiffany has $30,000 diamond rings in the case – so $5,000 seems more reasonable.
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I splashed out on the £30,000 ring; but it didn’t taste of much, and was so crunchy that I broke a tooth.
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Some varieties of truffle are fairly rare, ridiculously seasonal. And large ones are particularly rare. So they’re very, very expensive.
So truffles in general seem generally expensive.
So for your scam dish throwing piles of them on shit, whether it’s good or not, makes a $500 funnel cake seem plausible.
You don’t need to use the expensive truffles, and these places usually don’t. Usually using large and impressive looking but pretty cheap, Chinese varieties. Things like truffle oil and truffle salt are both cheap, and usually nothing to do with actual truffles.
Same deal gold leaf. Edible gold leaf isn’t expensive. It’s really thin, so there’s not actually a lot of gold there. Even at retail prices $25 bucks will get you enough sheets to cover multiple full cakes (it’s typically a pastry and confectioners thing).
So it doesn’t actually cost much to throw a bunch of gold on a plate. But it’s GOLD! So add a hundred bucks.
Caviar too. Some varieties (especially the illegal ones) are really, really expensive. But the world is loaded with affordable caviar. Throw an entire can of the cheap stuff on the worlds most expensive taco and people won’t ask questions.
Social media has made this trick much easier.
You don’t need a compliant reporter, or to have a “press conference” anymore.
Just throw it up on the gram.
I’m little surprised these guys bothered to submit it to the Guinness World Records folks. It’s usually enough to just claim you have the worlds most expensive lollypop, no vetting required.
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I’m not entirely convinced Guinness doesn’t slip a few buck to some of these places to get them to make it ‘official’. Now that everything’s on the 'tubes and you can’t sell a big dictionary-sized book of records every year, they have to keep new categories and new content churning or people will stop giving a shit.
I mean, I just watched the last series of QI, and they supposedly ‘set records’ for ‘Most Christmas crackers pulled in 30 seconds’ and ‘Fastest time getting into a full Santa outfit’
uh. sure. whatever.
In culinary terms, the difference between a fat and an oil is that oils are liquid at room temperature, while fats are solid, and only liquefy on heating. It has long been claimed that the best way to make fries is with high melting point fats- with beef tallow or goose fat getting the nod for the best medium to produce chips(fries). Thus, “goose fat, not oil” is actually a reasonable description.
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The truffles are there to justify the price, not make it taste good. (Those big shavings of truffle would be impossible to eat in something like this.) That’s always the way it is with these super-over-priced burgers (and now fries); they pick ingredients based on perceived luxury and expense, not because they enhance the taste (or even work together at all). So you end up with expensive ingredients (that still cost far, far less than what they’re charging for it) that actually make the dish taste worse or, at best, don’t add anything.
The only thing that actually adds something is the goose fat (though duck fat would be better, and cheaper), but you can’t charge $200 for that.
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They have always done that
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