Caviar Has Become the Costco Rotisserie Chicken of Fine Dining
Fish eggs are still a menu upsell, but they’re more popular than ever.
Illustration: Maggie Cowles for Bloomberg
The gleaming black-and-gold dining room at Coqodac is rowdy, and it isn’t even open for dinner yet. A table of “rappers and podcast hosts” are lingering over a late $4,000 caviar-and-champagne lunch, executive chef Seung Kyu Kim says. He doesn’t mind — he wants his Manhattan restaurant, notorious for its caviar-topped chicken nuggets ($28 per nugget), to be a place people come to celebrate.
As bird flu forces US stores to ration $10-a-dozen chicken eggs, salt-cured fish eggs have become inescapable at high-end restaurants. The slimy, briny spheres can now be found atop $68 sour-cream-and-onion dips in Nashville and $73 egg salads in San Francisco. But while customer perception of caviar as a luxury worth shelling out for has remained remarkably resilient for over a century, the wholesale cost of caviar — specifically, the roe from sturgeon — has dropped considerably in the past few years.