The rich are different than you and me, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, and that includes how they celebrate Valentine’s Day.
Pitched at the world’s growing class of ultra-rich 1 percenters is the most expensive Valentine’s dinner ever: a $99,300 meal that will be prepared by a Michelin-starred chef at your home.
The dinner includes ritzy ingredients such as duck eggs and truffles, as well as a dish of Wagyu beef touched with silver leaf that’s served on a bed of dry ice. Each dish in the eight-course meal is combined with a fine wine, such as the $27,680 bottle of La Romanee-Conti, Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, 1990. The price tag also includes a harpist, a poet and doves, as well as chef Adam Simmonds, who earned a Michelin star in 2006.
“We felt it was incumbent to offer something that was truly exceptional and where finance wasn’t the issue, but what was the issue was the ultimate and extreme in romance,” said Marcel Knobil, the founder of London-based VeryFirstTo, the company that masterminded the dinner.
Catering to the wealthiest doesn’t just mean providing cookie-cutter products, Knobil said.
“There are significant segments of consumers throughout many territories of the world who have a great amount of disposable income, and more and more are not as willing to buy luxury off the shelf,” he said. “They would much rather have something that’s bespoke.”