Stop trying to make caviar happen

Food trends are great, aren’t they? Amid life’s monotony, they help us make sense of the passing of time. The chore of choosing what to eat three times a day becomes marginally more exciting. They assist us when deciding what to order at the bar (lest we forget the month of Negroni Splagliatos). They give the team at Torres ideas for their next crisp flavour. 

Food trends are why we’re suddenly all scraping two dinners out of 39p butter beans and why everything you eat is doused in chilli oil. It’s why wine simply has to be orange; why you suddenly realised you actually love Guinness after all; why you’ve gone off Neck Oil completely after drinking that and only that for about three years. 

Ultimately, food trends can bring us closer together. They’re harmless, for the most part. But there’s a key distinction to be made here. And that’s between the food trends that are candid, silly, genuine, and those that are forced, unwillingly, down our tiny little throats. 

I’ve had emails instructing me to ‘swap the lamb for caviar’ at Easter

Which brings us to the latest. Those pesky, fishy black balls, all cold and strange and wet-looking, that you used to only see in films about the rich and famous. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re talking about caviar. 

Did you know a new Caviar Bar is about to open in Mayfair? No, not the already-existing Caviar House at Harrods which sells caviar-topped ice cream. Another one! Did you know that you can order a caviar rigatoni for £80 at the OWO’s restaurant Café Laperouse? Or that Jacuzzi’s pizza al caviale is dolloped with spoonfuls of the stuff? 

You could argue that caviar is by the by in places that market themselves as extravagantly monied, but recently there’s been a wider shift: London restaurants left, right, and centre have set out to normalise caviar as just a bit of a treat. I’ve had PR emails instructing me to ‘swap the lamb for caviar’ at Easter, to ‘wack it on a potato for a TV dinner’ and to indulge in an ‘all-caviar afternoon tea’. The one, tiny catch? It’s all really, really expensive. And surely an afternoon tea full of caviar borders on too much caviar. Surely. 

Caviar, just straight-up caviar, costs anywhere from £50 to £300 per 100 grams, and that’s before the restaurant marks up. It’s so insanely expensive because it’s the fish roe from rare sturgeon fish (beluga sturgeon and the likes). And this isn’t your standard fishing – you’ve got to grow these babies for up to 20 years in high-quality conditions; the water must be constantly running and the belugas must be fed truffle pasta straight out of cheese wheels.  

That caviar trend on TikTok last year (the one where the lady puts it on a crisp with sour cream, which does sound pretty nice, to give her her dues) should come with a warning: ‘do not try this at home’. She pops a tin of Kaluga Amber on a weeknight like it’s nothing. Eats it off a cucumber stick. That sort of behaviour is not for the common man. And there is every chance that she’s simply sponsored by Big Caviar anyway. She’s probably never paid for caviar in her life.

Ultimately, no matter what TikTok and London restaurants are trying to serve us, Caviar is not for normies like you and I. It’s either expensive, or it’s not caviar. And no one in their right mind needs to normalise one of the world’s most expensive ingredients. We did it with truffle, and we’re not doing it again. Don’t fall for it, people. Caviar is not for us. And that’s how it should be.