If I were an editor at one of the country’s leading newspapers and someone asked me for a list of the top 10 things we absolutely should not write about, under any circumstances, especially not now because, well, look around you, “rich people eating gold and other exorbitant ingredients in an effort to feel as though life has returned to normal and the pandemic is over” would be near or at the very top of that list.
That conversation apparently didn’t occur a few weeks ago at the Washington Post, because the paper allowed one of its writers to dedicate 1,000 fawning words to exactly that sort of faux escapism. You see, so-called status dishes — burgers stuffed with various shellfish and caviar, for example — are apparently making a comeback, fueled by chefs at exclusive restaurants in cities like Atlanta, Las Vegas, and New York who are eager to convince diners that spending big on french fries sprinkled with gold dust (which is literally but also figuratively tasteless) will make them forget about the contemporary American hellscape, or whatever. A gilded exterior is not enough for these people — they must have a gilded interior as well, at least until their next bowel movement.
The Post wanted us all to know that a 200-seat restaurant called Steak Market is coming to Atlanta in September, and that it will feature a member’s only cigar lounge and an otherwise perfectly good tomahawk steak encrusted in gold. There will be a raw bar, a lot of Wagyu, some Kobe, 300 different types of whiskey, and 300 different types of douchebag. And at Serendipity 3, a gimmicky restaurant for ultra-wealthy tourists located a few blocks from Central Park in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, diners can now feast on $200 french fries that are blanched in Dom Perignon, fried in cage free goose fat flown in from France, sprinkled with some complicated salt, and topped with black truffles and flecks of edible 23 karat gold.
The restaurant’s head chef believes they’re the best french fries in the world, and that the price is totally justified, but they honestly sound disgusting — and like a waste of good champagne. Extortionate prices aren’t a new phenomenon at Serendipity 3: There’s long been a $25,000 dessert on its menu. Indeed, the spot is notorious for its edible gold and steep prices, as well as its once mouse shit filled and cockroach infested kitchen. No matter about the excrement, though — rich people will put literally anything in their mouths as long as it’s expensive. (Sigmund Freud actually wrote about the connection between shit and gold. TL;DR: Gold is to miserly adults as shit is to anal retentive babies. I promise to revisit this shitty little thread in a future post.)
Across the park from Serendipity 3 in the Upper West Side — less than two miles from all that edible gold and rodent shit — the Lucerne Hotel has begun the process of kicking homeless people out of its rooms and relocating them to various shelters spread across the city. More than 60 hotels in New York City housed roughly 9,000 homeless people during the pandemic, but the city’s Department of Homeless Services is currently dismantling the program. The city is effectively forcing thousands of people back into crowded shelters despite the fact that it remains unclear what percentage of its homeless population is vaccinated.
The nation’s homeless population, which was growing before the onset of the pandemic, has expanded in COVID’s wake, and is only likely to increase after the Supreme Court decided to halt President Joe Biden’s moratorium on evictions more than a month before it was set to expire. (New York extended its moratorium until 2022, and the landlords are predictably angry.) Along with climate collapse and ceaseless war, COVID has deepened hunger across the globe, to the point that tens of millions of people are currently on the brink of famine. Can’t wait to try those gold french fries, though.
To be fair to rich people for a second, they have a long history of eating gold to feel better about their morally bankrupt lives. Take medieval Europe for example, where members of the noble class believed that precious metals like gold contained virtuous properties, and that if they ate it — say, ground up and sprinkled into a soup — those virtues would flow through their bodies and make them good. Please, ignore those debt-bonded peasants over there who will never know life outside of labor. We eat the gold dust, therefore we are absolved of all sin.
Of course, eating gold has nothing to do with being good and everything to do with being a tightwad. And despite the Post’s best efforts to spot one, there isn’t some hip new trend brewing here. For time immemorial, rich people have engaged in dumb, ostentatious behavior to assert their wealth and power, blissfully ignorant to the world outside. They have so much abundance that they can literally turn gold into shit without batting an eye.
Of course, this was never actually about escapism, because people who can comfortably spend $200 on a single potato’s worth of food have nothing to escape from to begin with. Gold-dusted french fries are just brunch — just as they were yesterday, and just as they’ll be tomorrow.