Oligarch cuisine: where will this madness end?

Salt Bae served a gold-leaf tomahawk steak in London for a staggering £1450. Now a Sydney restaurant has created a dish that really takes the biscuit.

Legend in his own lunchtime: Nusret “Salt Bae” Gökçe. Picture: YouTube

First we had one-time butcher Nusret “Salt Bae” Gökçe serving gold-leaf tomahawk steak in London for a mere £1450. No wonder a sacked sommelier (apparently he stole an avocado) called it “McDonalds for rich people”. Lo and behold, a gold-leaf tomahawk turns up in Sydney not so many months later. At Botswana Butchery, groups of four to 10 in the Gold Private Dining Room can order the 1.6kg Rangers Valley Wagyu tomahawk, covered in gold leaf, for $500 a head as part of a set menu. Ordered on its own, with sides, it serves four people and costs $875. (Memo BB: beware the disenfranchised former employee.)

There’s a bit of this Oligarch Cuisine around at the moment. Another Sydney restaurant recently created a dish – no doubt for publicity purposes – that really takes the biscuit. On one day in March, the chef at love.fish on Sydney’s Barangaroo waterfront did fish and chips with Patagonian toothfish and eastern rock lobster using a batter made with Belvedere Single Grain Vodka. It came with sebago potato chips, Spanish black truffle, Hadid Royal Oscietra caviar, Manetti gold dust from Italy and a hollandaise made with Cristal, the champagne of choice among the rapping community. If you were silly or rich enough (or both?) to make a reservation and order the dish, it cost $500 and I bet you were upsold to a glass of something fizzy. Or maybe a bottle of the 2012 Pol Roger Sir Winston Churchill at $900. Let’s call it $2000 for two with a little tip? Chicken feed, really.

Every now and then examples of grotesque consumerism creep into the headlines to remind us that oneupmanship isn’t confined to wine. Last year, pandemic notwith­standing, Dutch restaurant de Dalton took Oligarch Cuisine to a new level with an absurd burger it christened The Golden Boy. The ingredients include Japanese A5 Wagyu brisket and chuck short ribs; King crab; Dom Perignon onion rings; Paleta Ibérico Bellota jamon; white truffle; Beluga caviar; smoked saffron and chive mayonnaise made with duck eggs; barbecue sauce made with kopi luwak coffee (the beans plucked from civets’ faeces) and Macallan Single Malt Rare Cask; English truffled cheddar; matcha-pickled tiger tomatoes and cucumber; Dom Perignon, saffron and gold leaf bread; and whisky-infused smoke. It’s 5000 euros ($7320). It makes the Fleur Burger ($US5000 at Fleur in Las Vegas, which includes a Wagyu pattie with foie gras, black truffle and a bottle of 1995 Petrus thrown in) look like a bargain.

In 2017, however, a Mexican resort grabbed the intended headlines with the ultimate Oligarch Cuisine: a $US25,000 taco. Who’d think caviar, gold leaf and black truffle brie were compatible? El Chapo? I checked and it doesn’t appear on the restaurant’s current menu. Times have changed, it seems. Especially for oligarchs.