Beef futures: Eating a sandwich that costs as much as a small car
Burger Me: Eating a $5,000 sandwich in Las Vegas
by Paul Oswell
I’ve often wondered what kind of person goes to a restaurant and orders the meals that are so obviously a PR stunt. You know the kind of thing - a posh Italian restaurant puts gold leaf on a pizza and charges a grand a slice, or some gaff puts a diamond in your cocktail and suddenly that’ll be $800 for a Martini, please.
Today, that person is me. I’ve been sent to Las Vegas, surely the spiritual home for this kind of promotional cuisine. People there seem to love other people watching them blow through huge piles of cash - just look at the crowds that form around the gambling tables. If you’ve never been, Vegas is a neon-glazed paradise of conspicuous consumption with the worst piped-in soundtrack imaginable.
There’s no aspect of behaviour that is considered too gauche, no gesture too tacky. As long as you’re spending money, that is. Ask for a free, weirdly complicated cocktail at the high-stakes roulette wheel and they’ll bend over backwards for you. Try the same order at the penny slots and they’ll laugh at you and then bring you a warm Bud Light, or stick you with a hefty bar tab. Anyway, part of my assignment is to eat a $5,000 hamburger at a restaurant called Fleur, which is part of the Mandalay Bay casino.
You read that right. At this point, that’s almost a quarter of my annual salary, my entire income tax bill equalling the cost of one sandwich. I’m not sure how I feel about the whole thing. I’m obviously very happy not to be paying for it, but as I shower and change before dinner, I’m preemptively embarrassed about how showy it’s all going to be.
I’m also incredibly curious. What will a $5,000 burger look and taste like? Will it gleam under the lights? Will it have its own halo of culinary opulence? Will it melt in my mouth as trumpeting angels herald every swallow? At around $500 a mouthful, I’m scared I won’t fully appreciate the fiscal implications of the ingredients. Maybe the chef will come out and watch my reaction as I chomp into it. What face should I make, what sound should I emit? I feel like I need an antacid tablet before I even sit down.
Sit down I do, though, and it’s only 6pm, and so the restaurant is mercifully quiet. I’m told by my server, Eric, that I don’t need to worry about anything as the chef will just send things out. As he pours me a glass of water, he asks me if I have any questions, and I realise that I’ve done scant research so far.
I ask Eric what kind of meat the chef uses, where the bread comes from, and how the calculated cost comes out at $5,000. I always suspect that these menu items are randomly priced just to attract headlines. People who buy $5,000 burgers are probably just as likely to buy a $10,000 burger - if you have the kind of money whereby five-figure dinners don’t really make a dent in your bank account, then there’s probably not much difference, bar the slight uptick in the value of bragging rights. My point is that these numbers are probably just plucked out of the air.
Eric politely tells me that most of the value comes from the fact that the burger is served with a $4,500 bottle of 1995 Petrus, a gut-punchingly expensive wine that might as well be distilled from the tears of endangered hummingbirds for all the relevance it has to my life.
The wine is the perfect pairing for the burger according to the restaurant’s sommelier, Eric says. It must have been such a relief that the ideal wine for this dish wasn’t a $9.99 bottle of Barefoot Chardonnay because where would your margins be then? The wine also comes with two, cut-crystal glasses (worth around $200 each) that you get to keep as a souvenir, like promotional sippy-cups for billionaires. The pricing, as brutal as it still is, at least makes a modicum more sense.
My excitement about trying a wine that costs as much as a car is disappointingly short lived. I politely question the server about the specifics of the wine, just to look as though I have the first clue about what I’m doing. They smile at me with all the sympathetic condescension that they can muster and say, “I’m so sorry, but since this is a complimentary meal, we won’t be serving the Petrus or using the crystal glasses. You’re welcome to purchase any alcoholic drinks you like, of course.”
Of course, I would LIKE to order the perfect wine pairing for this obscene meal, but given my economic reality, a glass of Barefoot Chardonnay, or its equivalent, will have to suffice this time. I put in my order and wait for the burger. I’d been careful that day not to eat too much so as not to spoil my appetite, and also so that my throes of gastronomic ecstasy at least look somewhat convincing when the chef watches me chow down.
The burger doesn’t come out first. The server brings a charcuterie board as an appetiser, with delicious shaved prosciutto and chorizo. I eat most of it, my thinking being that they are so thinly sliced that they can’t contain many calories. Where would they hide? The meats are only a few atoms thick and the side order of bread will surely just get me back to a base level appetite after heroically denying myself all day.
The charcuterie board dispatched, I await the main attraction. “Chef just wants you to try a couple of other small dishes,” Eric says as he delivers one plate of short ribs and one plate of grilled octopus. “They’re still preparing your burger, this will just tide you over.” Now that I’ve stimulated my tastebuds with the appetisers, I realise that I am actually quite peckish now that I come to think of it. I try to keep myself from indulging too much, but twenty minutes later, Eric is removing my empty plates.
The $5,000/$100 burger is a patty of Wagyu beef doused in rich, truffle-infused butter. It is topped with prime foie gras and a sizeable mound of sliced black truffles (I’m told these cost in the region of $1,500 per pound). The ingredients are served in a brioche bun, also with hints of truffle.
Eric sets the plate down in front of me and removes the metal cloche that covers the meaty treasure with theatrical relish. There’s no fanfare, or public announcement that some idiot has ordered a $5k sandwich. It’s just me, looking at a novelty burger and not feeling hungry at all. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to ask for more bread with the octopus.
Eric lingers expectantly, watching for the reaction that would accompany my first bite. This is it. This is the money shot. “I’m just going to savour the look and smell of it for a minute,” I say. Eric nods and heads back to the kitchen. Thankfully, there’s no sign that the chef will come to the table.
I’m so full. Why did they send out so many dishes before the main event? They must have known that this is the entire point of this whole evening. Why did they tempt me with prosciutto and chorizo and ribs and octopus? What was I supposed to do, NOT eat everything that's put in front of me like I’m about to fast for a week? I’m notoriously too weak to ignore free food or to exercise any kind of moderation. Didn’t they do any background checks?
I can see that Eric is coming out to do his rounds again, using his water refilling duties as a Trojan horse. I take as big a bite as I can muster. If there’s one word I had to use to describe the taste, it’s…truffly. The truffle oils and infusions and actual truffles dominate what I believe is referred to as the Flavour Profile. If I’m being diplomatic, I would say that the Flavour Profile of the burger is “truffle forward”. Very truffly. Almost too truffly, if I’m being honest.
I manage two mouthfuls. The foie gras and burger grease are beyond rich. Eric passes by and I do that thing where you try smiling while chewing and saying “mmmmmmm” in a performative way that you hope is convincing. He gives me a thumbs up. As I slowly chew and chew, the truffles overwhelming my tastebuds, I wonder about the etiquette of asking for a leftovers box.
********
The next day, I have to check out of my hotel and catch a flight back to London. In the end, I did ask for a box for my quarter-eaten burger. Eric hid his astonishment very well and I tipped him accordingly for his discretion. He promised me he wouldn’t tell the chef how little I’d eaten, and I promised him that I would finish it the next day.
The white polystyrene box sits in the refrigerator, looking at me accusingly. At 11am, an hour before I have to leave, I decide it’s too comically wasteful to throw it away, and I can’t very well just leave a note for the cleaning staff inviting them to have a taste. I conclude that I really have to eat it.
I don’t know why, but I fill the tub using way too much bubble bath, just to try and create any level of ersatz decadence. There’s no microwave in the hotel room, and so I sit in my bathtub and methodically and joylessly eat the cold, coagulating burger, truffle and foie gras and all. These are probably the most expensive leftovers I will ever eat. I wish I’d saved some of those short ribs, I think to myself as I force another bite down, trying to ignore the increasingly tepid water. Those ribs were really very tasty.
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