$25,000 10-Course Bangkok Dinner
It was an evening of utter decadence — a 10-course gourmet dinner concocted by world-renowned chefs that many diners had trouble finishing, even through they paid $25,000 each.
Those who attended Saturday night’s culinary extravaganza in Bangkok hailed it as the meal of a lifetime.
But it’s no easy task to eat through plate after plate of Beluga caviar, Perigord truffles, Kobe beef, Brittany lobster — each paired with a rare and robust vintage wine.
“It’s beautiful. It’s really amazing,” said one diner, Sophiane Foster, a wealthy Cambodian who lives in Malaysia, as she eyed the dinner’s eighth course — a “pigeon en croute with cepes mushrooms.” “But I can’t finish it. Your senses can only appreciate so much.”
High-rolling food lovers jetted in from the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia for the 40-seat dinner organized by the Lebua luxury hotel, grandly titled “Epicurean Masters of the World.”
Cooked by six-three star Michelin chefs — four from France and one each from Italy and Germany — the menu featured complicated creations like “tartar of Kobe beef with Imperial Beluga caviar and Belon oysters” and “mousseline of ‘pattes rouges’ crayfish with morel mushroom infusion.”
Among the talented chefs, some said they found it challenging to give diners their money’s worth.
Antoine Westermann of Le Buerhiesel, the famous restaurant in Strasbourg, France, said he shaved 3 1/2 ounces (100 grams) of Perigord truffles — worth about $350 — onto each plate for a delicate tower of coquille Saint-Jacques and truffles.
“For $25,000, what do you expect?” he said.
As guests entered the dinner, held at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant on the 65th floor overlooking Bangkok, attendants bowed and scattered rose petals at their feet. Men wore tuxedos and women were dripping in diamonds. The guests included Fortune 500 executives, a casino owner from Macau and a Taiwanese hotel owner, said Deepak Ohri, the hotel’s managing director, who declined to reveal their identities.
Chefs submitted their grocery lists to organizers and the ingredients were flown in fresh: black truffles, foie gras, oysters and live Brittany lobsters from France; caviar from Switzerland; Jerusalem artichokes and white truffles from Rome.
Diners sipped their way through legendary vintages, like a 1985 Romanee Conti, a 1959 Chateau Mouton Rothschild, a 1967 Chateau d’Yquem and a 1961 Chateau Palmer, considered “one of the greatest single wines of the 20th century,” said Alun Griffiths of Berry Bros. & Rudd, the British wine merchants that procured and shipped about six bottles of each wine for the dinner.
The wine alone cost more than $200,000, Griffiths said.
“Just to have one of these would be a great treat,” he said. “To have 10 of them in one evening is the sort of thing that people would kill for.”
Wine lovers regularly organize exorbitantly expensive tastings in New York, London and Japan but such events are not as common in Thailand, where it would take the average schoolteacher five years to earn $25,000.
By Sun Tzu on 12-02-2007
