"When Luxury Turns Lewd and Laughable"
From Penta:
Enough already. We’re tired of tasteless luxury pitches that
patronizingly assume that the wealthy are too dim to know when they are
being conned. For this reason, Penta will periodically profile
products or services targeted at the very rich that, at times, are so
egregious they border on scams. Penta is all in favor of celebrating the joys of life – but never conspicuous consumption as a front for going mildly insane. Penta is all about finding good value for money. These products don’t qualify.
The $1,000 ice cream sundae. The Golden Opulence Sundae, served at New York’s Serendipity 3 restaurant,
is bedecked with a golden leaf and eaten with a nacre spoon.
Serendipity tells us that that the Golden Opulence Sundae’s customers
range from parents celebrating their daughter’s law school graduation to
Saudi princes.
The dessert was initially created for the restaurant’s 50th
Golden Anniversary back in 2004, and the parlor claims it receives one
to two calls a month for the dessert that requires a 48-hour advance
notice to prepare. That suggests the sweet-tooth hangout is ringing in
some $20,000 annually from the gold-bedecked dish.
This over-the-top sundae is actually a more modest version of
Serendipity’s Frrrozen Haute Chocolate ice cream sundae, which it
launched a few years ago and cost $25,000. The ice cream made of the
rarest cocoa sat atop a diamond, which made it the most expensive
dessert in the world, according to the Guinness World Records. The dish
was eventually dropped when Serendipity couldn’t find anyone actually
foolish enough to order it.
The $1,000 Golden Opulence Sundae is served in a crystal goblet you
get to take home. “You could drive a Chevrolet or a Maserati, but what
are you going to enjoy more? It’s the intrigue of having the most
expensive menu item,” claims Joe Calderone, Serendipity’s head chef.
Well, not all of us are as titillated by the thought of overspending on a
commodity item. For a quarter of the cost, we suggest picking up a $200
goblet from, say, Furstenberg or Feu de Beaumont, and then filling it
with a $31 pint of Cappanari’s award-winning Chocolate Hazelnut Ganache
ice cream.
The $40,000 a night villa. Laucala Island Resort’s Hilltop Estate
is one of the many villas found on the island in Fiji. It offers 13,130
square feet of living space with its landscaped pool, private cook,
chauffeur, and nanny. The owner of the island, Red Bull king Dietrich
Mateschitz, according to The Wall Street Journal, handpicks his guests....MORE
