Eat With Style

The Pizza Royale came out with its champagne-soaked caviar and gold plate and a price tag of $4,982. Now, Malta has launched the most expensive commercially sold pizza. It is 24-carat gold leaf and buffalo mozzarella and white truffles mounted on a thin traditional crust and costs $2,379.36. The idea sprouted with pizza-maker Giovanni Staiano and his boss and restaurant owner Claude Camilleri were testing and checking out some truffles. Giovanni joked that it would be cool to have a pizza made of truffles and make it ‘vulgar’ using gold leaf.

Giovanni made a ‘masterpiece’ with his recipe through which he wants to draw attention to the ‘quality of food’. Apparently the price tag is this hot because of the price of truffles which is currently being sold at $8,602.49 per kilo. Camilleri’s Margo restaurant, is vying for entering the Guinness Books of World Records with its expensive treat.

Chef Umberto Bombana has been given the task of cooking a 900 gram truffle, this year’s prize winner at the 12th World White Truffle of Alba Auction. This giant truffle was bought by Jeannie Choo Lee, a Hong Kong based wine expert for a whopping US$142,653 this Nov. 16. Now that is a pretty big task for the chef, but he says he isn’t nervous. He has cooked a bigger truffle in 2006, when he was executive chef Hong Kong’s old Ritz Carlton. Here he had cooked a 1.5Kg truffle that was purchased by property tycoon, Gordon Wu.

Truffles have a very short shelf life and must be cooked within a week. 25 to 30 guests will be consuming this soccer-sized fungus. White truffles have a very delicate texture and aren’t cooked much. They are in fact usually freshly shaved on a dish. That is why chef Bombana will focus on the other dishes that will be topped with this truffle.

It will be an eight-course dinner with porcini risotto, egg ravioli with ricotta cheese and spinach in hazelnut butter, and roasted veal tenderloin with braised savoy cabbage, Iberico ham and truffle mash potatoes on the menu.

The Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong, which is playing host to the world renowned chef, Thomas Keller, is making most of his visit in terms of making profits. It seems that when people heard that Keller was coming to Hong Kong, they started booking in advance to get a taste of his scrumptious delicacies. The list that had gone up to 1000 has now shrunk to 500. The hotel is charging a whopping US$835 a head for the 11-course dinner.

This figure is triple of what people have to pay US$275 to enjoy the 9-course tasting menu at his Per Se restaurant in New York. This has broken the previous record of the most expensive meal here, which was Catalan chef Jordi Roca’s six-course tasting dinner that came in at $2,847 with wine.

The guests will get to savor Keller’s home-grown garden radishes along with Hawaiian "hearts of peach palm" salad, a signature sweet butter-poached Maine lobster, and for dessert-"M&M’s" served with Tawny 20-year old port wine. The chef will be here on a four day visit from Nov. 29 to Dec. 2 and will cook lunch and dinner every day.