And just when you think Shanghai can't outdo itself on
absurdly expensive things and luxury on steroids, along comes a pizza with a price tag of nearly 1,000RMB. Yes, that's right: One. Thousand. Ren. Min. Bi. Our eyes almost popped out of our skulls when we saw that, too. What could it possibly have on it, you ask? Heaps of caviar.
The caviar pizza – priced 888RMB plus 10 percent service, which means a total of 976.80RMB – is part of Mercato's new limited edition menu of 'Diamond Pizzas', an extension of the restaurant's insanely popular truffle pizza and which, at the moment, features foie gras and matsutake mushroom pizzas alongside the caviar and signature black truffle. The menu launched earlier this month, and we did our investigative best (for journalism!) and went to try them all.
First, a quick bit of background on Mercato and its pizzas. Tucked on the sixth floor of Three on the Bund, Mercato is Jean-Georges Vongerichten's casual, laid-back but classy Italian restaurant. While the kitchen turns out a whole menu of thoughtful appetisers and mains and a strong lineup of 12 different pizzas, statistically the chances are if you're going there, you'll be getting the dish that's become synonymous with Mercato: the black truffle pizza with three cheeses and a farm egg. It's far and away, the restaurant's best-seller. In the past month, the kitchen's dished out 1,077 truffle pizzas and, on average, it accounts for around 60 percent of all pizzas sold.
While it seems that little is ever going to dethrone the black truffle pizza (it is damn good, by the way), the Diamond Pizza collection gives it some equally luxe friends. Two of the four pizzas rely on seasonal ingredients, meaning the menu has a lifespan. Here's the rundown.