Food & Drink

New York City’s most obscenely expensive dishes

NYC’s menus have no shortage of luxury gimmicks. Think of the Algonquin’s $10,000 martini, which comes with a diamond ring, or Manila Social Club’s $100 ube doughnut, coated in 24-karat edible gold. But precious gems and metals aside, lots of regular restaurant grub is draining diners’ wallets, too. The Post surveyed menus from over 50 major eateries and found eye-popping prices on everything from fried bar snacks to plain-vanilla desserts. Here, owners and staffers explain why.

Salad

Food snob’s Cobb at the Garden

The Garden at Four Seasons Hotel

You’ll shell out more green than you eat when you tuck into this minimalist tossed entree. Like a classic Cobb, this riff served at the Four Seasons Hotel marries tender lettuce, crispy bacon, hot-off-the-grill chicken, tomatoes, avocado and blue-cheese-buttermilk dressing. Unlike its cousins, however, this Cobb’ll cost you $43. Ingredient sourcing from small-scale purveyors — such as Vermont’s Blue Ledge Farm — ensure diners get a superlative salad experience, chef John Johnson tells The Post. And either way, he adds, it’s a decent deal. “We base [our prices] on the competitive set in our market, and we’re well within the range,” he says.

Crabcake

The Grill’s pricey patty

Daniel Krieger Photography

This crabcake is cooked, but you’ll still feel the pinch. The ritzy new dining room in the former Four Seasons is taking the leggy crustacean to new luxury heights with a modest mound of sweet meat that goes for 37 bucks. The Grill’s restaurateur Jeff Zalaznick says the 3 ¹/₂-ounce appetizer — called the Seagram, after the eatery’s iconic building — is made from Dungeness crabs that are shipped live to the restaurant daily, and the tender patty is free of bland filler ingredients such as breadcrumbs and mayo. “This is the most pure expression of Dungeness crab that you can present,” Zalaznick says. Don’t expect bells and whistles from the finishing touches, either: The Seagram sits on a slick of mustard and wears a simple lid of pan-crisped potato coins. Ka-ching!

Onion rings

Golden rings at Delmonico’s

Brogan & Braddock

The historic Financial District steakhouse isn’t claiming to reinvent the wheel with its crispy circles. As they are citywide, the onion rings at Delmonico’s are thickly battered with flour and ale, then deep-fried to crispy perfection and drizzled with blue-cheese dressing. Chef Billy Oliva claims the $19 price tag comes in part from the precision required to fry the rings and serve them immediately for optimal deliciousness. “I’ll be honest with you: When it’s busy, it’s a pain in the ass,” Olivia tells The Post of prepping the side. Mostly, though, the greasy gourmet indulgence helps bankroll overhead costs. “I guess the bottom line is that my boss needs to pay the rent, right?” he says.

Shrimp cocktail

Jumbo tab at King Cole Bar

Annie Wermiel

The celebs who regularly swarm the sophisticated lounge of East 55th Street’s St. Regis hotel think nothing of paying $40 for five shrimp on ice. Regular New Yorkers might think twice. “We have relationships with purveyors from the Gulf Coast who provide us with the best-quality shrimp,” chef de cuisine Daniel De La Rosa explains in an e-mailed statement to The Post. Perhaps the secret is in the cocktail sauce? Made fresh with a combination of horseradish, ketchup and a spicy, tomato-y secret blend that doubles as the bar’s Bloody Mary base, the dip delivers “the highest level of freshness,” De La Rosa writes.

Pasta and red sauce

Nello’s high-cost carbs

Brian Zak

A sauce called pomodoro e basilico seems fancy, but boil it down in English and it’s little more than basic tomatoes and basil. Served over thin strands of capellini at infamously expensive Upper East Side Italian bistro Nello, it’s $36, too. That’s not a problem for the restaurant’s rich regulars, according to maitre d’ George Goutakolis. “It’s an incredible dish. It’s very slow cooked, with special tomatoes. I wish I could tell you more,” he says of the rustic peasant fare. “People are going crazy for it.” Makes sense: You’d have be slightly nuts to pay that price.

Porterhouse

‘21’ Club’s bloody-expensive beef

21 Club

Usually meant to feed two, an oversize T-bone porterhouse can easily cost a cool Benjamin at city restaurants. But at this cozy Midtown dining hall within a former speakeasy, the going rate gets doubled for a porterhouse that goes for a jaw-dropping $215. (And no, you don’t get to keep the copper serving dish.) Dry-aged and served under twin lumps of beurre maître d’hotel — better known as seasoned butter and parsley — the 48-ounce broiled slab comes with garden-variety Yukon Gold potatoes and a meager knot of watercress. Executive chef Sylvain Delpique says each steak is cut by a master butcher in The Bronx to stringent specifications — and apparently to lucrative effect. The restaurant has moo-ved more than 14,000 porterhouses in the past 12 months alone, he says.

Rotisserie chicken

Poultry for the 1 percent at Le Coq Rico

Le Coq Rico

Much has been written about this French cafe’s painstaking approach to prepping rotisserie birds. Raised for 80 days longer on average than typical livestock hens, their free-range heritage chickens grow plump on a natural omnivorous diet. In the kitchen, the chickens are first slow-cooked in a house-made bone broth, then slow-roasted in an oven, then finished on a rotating spit for up to four diners to share. “[Cooking] is not only gentle, it’s slower than gentle,” says Patricia Westermann, Le Coq Rico’s sourcing and marketing manager. Still, with regular rotisserie birds selling for 8 bucks at C-Town, it’s hard not to cluck over Le Coq Rico’s triple-digit price.

Gelato

Harry Cipriani’s sweet moneymaker

Cipriani's

If you have extra cash burning a hole in your pocket after a meal at this opulent Fifth Avenue eatery, spring for the $27 gelato di vaniglia al momento. Yup, it’s just vanilla gelato, and it contains nothing more than milk, heavy cream, egg yolks, vanilla bean and sugar, a pastry-chef staffer who requested anonymity tells The Post. What’s more, the four-person bowl takes a whopping 20 minutes to make. “When we receive the order from a table, we pour the mixture into this wonderful Italian ice cream machine that helps us deliver that smooth, silky consistency and texture,” the staffer says. “It is worth the wait” — for the restaurant, anyway.

Peanut butter cup

Bouchon Bakery’s candy cash-in

Brian Zak

Chocolate and peanut butter are a match made in confection heaven, and few delivery methods beat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which can be had for a dollar a pair. That hasn’t stopped Thomas Keller’s dessert enterprise from elevating the classic candy — or its cost, at least — with a fancified mini version. “Our peanut butter cup is filled with a rich peanut butter ganache made from Skippy Natural Peanut Butter, milk chocolate and crushed pieces of nougatine,” says Alessandra Altieri Lopez, director of Bouchon’s two locations. “The ganache is then finished with fleur de sel salt to highlight and enhance the flavor.” In Midtown, apparently, even cavities don’t come cheap.

Negroni

Boozy bonanza at Ai Fiori

The old-school cocktail is trending, and at this 36th Street French-Italian hot spot, it’s commanding prices to match. Ai Fiori isn’t stirring up the drink with just any old bottle of Campari; rather it’s offering a version that uses a special vintage of the bitter Italian liqueur from the 1970s. “You can [taste] how the recipes change from year to year,” says Pete Stanton, Ai Fiori’s head bartender. But unless your palate is refined enough to pick up on a liqueur’s complexity after it has been shaken with sweet vermouth and gin, a $30 glass might be tough to swallow.

Gin & tonic

Fussy fizzer at Per Se

David Escalante

G&Ts are normally made with gin, tonic water, a twist of lime and perhaps a dash of simple syrup. The overpriced riff at notoriously posh Per Se keeps all the old-school elements — including basic Beefeater gin — but it replaces the tonic water with two separate ingredients: club soda and quinine powder, which are the two main ingredients in tonic water. Hmm. General manager Sam Calderbank tells The Post that the beverage — billed as a tonic & gin — is a “refined version of a classic.” The price is definitely different; we’ll give him that.

Coffee, $24

Big-ticket brew at Eleven Madison Park

Everything — even a cuppa joe — is spendy at this splashy spot, deemed the World’s Best Restaurant by San Pellegrino. A rare grind called Wush Wush, sourced from a small farm in Colombia, sells for a staggering $24 per pour. Coffee director Maya Albert preps the java tableside, using a stopwatch to time the brewing. Although the restaurant’s reps declined to comment for The Post, the eatery reportedly earns a bigger profit from its more reasonably priced — and far more popular — cappuccinos.