7 Real Fast Food Items Only Insanely Rich People Can Buy
Forget science. Forget art. Humanity's final and finest intellectual victory over our origins is fast food. Early humans spent their entire lives questing to eat. Now we grab greasy meat chunks in minutes so that we can dump every precious second of our lives back into our jobs without wasting it on irresponsible luxuries like relaxing with a meal. Of course, if you're still looking for luxury in those four minutes that you're cramming a sandwich into your ravenous eat-hole, then don't worry. The world has you covered.
The $120 Kobe-Philly Cheesesteak
The Philly cheesesteak happened when Philadelphia pretended to invent slicing meat. Then they drowned it in cheese. It's gorgeous, but it treats the meat the same way a recycling plant treats paper: slicing it up, mashing it into a paste, and feeding it into a pulping machine to knock out lower-quality chunks.
The Kobe-Philly cheesesteak sounds like William Gibson wrote a cookbook in which a multinational cyberchef gene-splices American cattle to pre-combine the cheese and meat in their own flesh. Which would still be less of a waste of modern technology than Barclay Prime's Kobe-Philly cheesesteak, because they charge $120 to use Kobe Wagyu beef.
While you're desecrating things, don't forget to use the champagne to belch the national anthem.
Kobe Wagyu beef is beautiful. The cows are bred, fed, and treated so that they deposit fat between their muscle fibers, which sounds like the beginning to a really bad sci-fi horror written by PETA. It's the closest thing humans have to energon -- the most refined version of what makes us work. But if you're going to slice Kobe Wagyu beef into strips and stuff them into cheese and bread, then you might as well slice the Mona Lisa into strips to prop up the table you're eating it on.
True butchery of the original meat.
Philly cheesesteaks are great, but the only way to make one worth 120 dollars would be if it came with 20 more of them.
The World's Most Expensive Hot Dog -- $169
Hot dogs are the closest we've come as a species to saving our planet. Forget guilt trips and urgent climate data; just connect our gluttony and laziness to efficiency, and we'll eat the asshole of every animal on Earth in the name of recycling. Hot dogs have made meat processing one of the most efficient industries in the world.
"You want to WHAT my WHAT?"
The secret to this success is garnish. Tokyo Dog's "Junni Ban" turns Wagyu Beef into a sausage -- so gather up those strips of the Mona Lisa and shred them down into splinter-ridden toilet paper -- then drown it in foie gras, truffles, and caviar. Because hey, why the hell not?
Not so much a hot dog as a thermonuclear attack on a pound
They piled up everything expensive they could find, like a demolition derby in a classic car museum. If somebody had told Tokyo Dog that uranium was expensive, then you'd need to wear a hazmat suit to even hold the dog. They claim that it's the result of careful work, but they also claim that a hot dog is worth $169 and waiting a full fortnight before receiving your order, so they clearly don't even know what words even mean.
A $214 Grilled Cheese
Serendipity 3 serves the "Quintessential Grilled Cheese" sandwich for $214. French bread is infused with champagne, spread with white truffle butter, filled with Caciocavallo Podolico cheese, and then actually coated in a thin layer of gold. Because at this point, humans have just stopped giving a shit about pretty much everything. We're very close to crossing a line where we just say "fuck it" and eat our actual paychecks.
Making a grilled cheese sandwich even more depressing, because it's worth more than you.
This isn't even taking food to the next level. They're just gold-plating regular things. It's like hiring the New York Philharmonic to play background music at the DMV. You're wasting a colossal amount of money on a tedious little chore, and every single person involved, from the server to the chef to the maniacally laughing restaurant owner, now knows you're an asshole.
They say that some of the money goes to charity. You know what would be better? ALL of the money going to charity without some of it first being spent on becoming a symbol of ironic mockery for everyone in need.
The Thousand-Dollar Pizza
Pizza is the ultimate fast food. It acts as its own plate and cutlery, and holds the food in place with edible glue. It couldn't be faster if it was aerodynamically fired at you, and its perfectly circular shape means that might one day be possible. It's so fast that you can be standing in your own kitchen, in front of bags of your own freshly-bought groceries, and it would still feel faster to command someone to bring you pizza from miles away.
Modern life doesn't give us enough chances to command.
Nino's Restaurant in New York offers the Bellisima pizza. It costs 1,000 actual real dollars, with the bulk of the money going toward the six different kinds of caviar in the topping. But putting six different kinds of caviar on the same pizza is like hiring six concert pianists to play in the same Ibiza nightclub toilet. Even if you can tell them apart when they're all crammed together (which you can't), you're still distracted by all the awfully organic fluids and gooeyness all around them.
An offer you can quite easily refuse.
It's the final proof that these rich assholes really are just pouring money into a blender and trying to taste it. Even the most avid caviar aficionado wouldn't ruin them by mixing them together or putting them under cheese like this. In fact, that person is the last human who ever would. This is proof of caviar being used as some kind of obscenity-shaker; something the appallingly rich wiggle over their food like some sort of asshole-based salt.
The Thousand-Dollar Ice Cream Sundae
The ice cream sundae was created in the darkest bowels of depression as an alternative to suicide, and thankfully, it worked.
The "Golden Opulence Sundae" is served by New York's Serendipity 3, the same people who turned grilled cheese into a moral abomination. It might as well be called Fuck Poor People. The first thing it does is destroy the point of both desserts and fast food by requiring one to order it 48 hours ahead of time.
Auric Goldfinger would consider this a dick move.
The second thing it does is destroy a bit of the planet by specially flying in components from around the world. The ingredient list reads like Phineas Fogg's passport, and is even more dementedly determined to traverse the globe for no reason other than money. Even if there was a detectable difference between Tahitian and Madagascan vanilla for anyone whose tongue hasn't been replaced with a mass spectrometer, mixing them together under chocolate would annihilate it.
"But wanking into thousand-dollar bills had begun to chafe."
Then they throw a dollop of caviar over candied fruits, because at this point, the physical taste is irrelevant. This is not a sundae; it's a machine designed to harvest the tears resulting from unequal wealth distribution. The lizard creatures consuming this aren't eating ice cream. They're eating the agony of those whose lives could have been saved by the cost of that one douchey purchase.
The Thousand-Dollar Omelette
Omelettes: for when the only cooking you can be bothered with is "smashing things and then burning them." Food so fast that it's creation is the exact same procedure as a racing accident. This is food for when you want to assert human dominance by eating another species' broken and empty dreams.
The egg was eaten first, and that's the only important answer here.
The "Zillion Dollar Lobster Omelette" is a mockery of human progress. The original point of money was that we realized there were useful activities other than food gathering, and didn't want the useful people doing those activities to starve. So you exchange things for food to stay alive. But nobody buying the Zillion Dollar Lobster Omelette is doing anything useful, or needs to be kept alive. The restaurant isn't harvesting the dumb lobsters for money; they're harvesting the dumb customers, because they've realized that stupidity pays better than succulence.
It looks like a cheap Doctor Who villain instead of expensive food.
So we know it has lobster in it. Fine. We can handle the idea of a lobster omelette, and we'd even go so far as to say that we'd pay more for that than the ones you get at Denny's at 3 a.m. after a night of Jagerbombs and deep, ugly crying. But then the Zillion buries that under ten ounces of caviar. Even if you like caviar -- the stuff's actually really interesting, though extremely salty -- ten ounces isn't a treat. It's a Twilight Zone punishment designed to make you hate your favorite things, including your own tongue.
But as we've learned so far, these dishes all go by one solid rule: Put caviar on it, and you can charge three times the cost of an average car payment. And nobody knows that rule better than ...
The Glamburger -- $1770
The best thing about a burger is how you can pile everything on a patty and just eat the shit out of it. The Honky Tonk's "Glamburger" does that with everything wrong on this list. Lobster, caviar, gold flakes, black truffle brie -- all pilled on a patty of Kobe Wagyu beef and New Zealand venison.
King Midas just shat himself in joy, then used it to top this burger.
The whole point of Kobe beef is the texture. If you mince it, then you might as well mince a cheerleading squad, because it has the same effect: You're reducing the result of years of work and exercise to a flesh slurry, and you can't expect anyone to celebrate.
"GO! AWAY! AAAAAAAGH!"
The worst part isn't even the duck egg intricately coated in gold leaf -- and there is a duck egg intricately coated in gold leaf -- but the "smoked Himalayan salt." Putting a place name in front of food doesn't improve anything, and it sure as hell doesn't make a fucking seasoning sound more impressive. The ionic bond between sodium and chloride doesn't become more magical just because it's been harvested from high up on a mountain. It's not like it was enlightened by mountain meditation. And even if it was, the self-awareness would force it to dissociate into the two deadly poisons in the mouth of anyone eating a Glamburger.
Look, we're not saying that spending tons of money on stupid shit is a crime. If you have the money, then we're very happy for you, and we think that's awesome. But at the very least, don't give it to people who just slap caviar on something normal and then jack up the price "just because." If that's the case, we have some Chef Boyardee beefaroni that would go great with some Beluga. For a price.
Luke has a website, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet. For more palatable pain, read about how he ate all the hottest suicide wings in one night.
Fast food items for the insanely poor will often end up with dirt and grime after an employee adheres to the five-second rule. See what else could go wrong in The 5 Worst Things You See While Working in Fast Food. And make sure not to miss out on Pizza Hut's free small animal with every meal in 4 New Fast Food Deals (For People Who Hate Themselves).
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