{"id":2203,"date":"2007-03-15T10:02:04","date_gmt":"2007-03-15T18:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2007\/03\/quattro_caviar_has_such_a_nice_ring_to_it.html"},"modified":"2008-01-24T13:32:10","modified_gmt":"2008-01-24T18:32:10","slug":"quattro_caviar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/03\/quattro_caviar.html","title":{"rendered":"“Quattro Caviar” Has Such A Nice Ring To It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Staten Islanders are wildly uninterested in $1,000 pizza<\/a>:<\/p>\n

For $1,000, the city’s most prodigal foodies can get a lobster- and caviar-drenched pizza at Nino’s Bellisima on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.<\/p>\n

That works out to about $25 per bite of the four-slice, 12-inch pie — a price that prompted Staten Islanders interviewed yesterday to respond with “Huh?” then, incredulously, “What did they put on that pizza?” and finally the admission that they would be hard-pressed to swallow such an extravagance.<\/p>\n

“I came up with the idea to have something the most spectacular, unique!” said Nino Selimaj, the owner of the joint where pies on the regular menu cost between $14 and $20, as well as five other restaurants in the city. “People didn’t used to think they would ever pay $300 for Asian fusion when they could get Chinese takeout and now they do it all the time.”<\/p>\n

In his thick, Albanian accent, Selimaj boasted he had tried hundreds of different recipes before devising the dish, which he said costs about $720 in raw materials.<\/p>\n

Served cold and compiled in about 20 minutes, the creation is crowned by creme fraiche, eight ounces of four different kinds of caviar — Petrossian, Beluga, Ossetra and Sevruga — and a two-pound Maine lobster tail sliced so thin that the glean of caviar can be seen through its translucent meat. The pieces are separated by chives and topped with a hint of wasabi and salmon roe.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

Ayanna Phillip of Stapleton waxed poetic on what she would do with $1,000 instead of eating chichi pizza (“I’d pay my bills; I’d go shopping, you could buy, like, 100 outfits”) as she waited to pick up her order at one of the borough’s more economical pie emporiums, My Pizza in Concord — where a large pie goes for $8.<\/p>\n

“I wouldn’t buy that pizza even if I was Bill Gates,” she said, scrunching up her face at the thought of a slice topped by caviar.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, Island pizza chefs make a good case for avoiding pretentious pie:<\/p>\n

“One thousand is a little crazy; They’d be getting a bargain with our pie,” said Michael Costello, the chef and manager of Pizza on the Plaza, New Dorp, which sells, by all accounts the Island’s most expensive pie.<\/p>\n

Pizza on the Plaza’s $100 dish features fontina cheese, arugula pesto, a couple ounces of shaved truffles and lobster meat. Since the item was unveiled last summer, one customer ordered a few of the pizzas for a Halloween Party; otherwise demand has been, to put it kindly, very slow.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Staten Islanders are wildly uninterested in $1,000 pizza: For $1,000, the city’s most prodigal foodies can get a lobster- and caviar-drenched pizza at Nino’s Bellisima on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. That works out to about $25 per bite of the four-slice, 12-inch pie — a price that prompted Staten Islanders interviewed yesterday to respond with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class_war","category-staten_island"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}