Dubai is renowned for its love of luxury so an exorbitantly priced dish on a menu is not exactly unprecedented.
However, a new addition to the list at Beluga – the city’s only caviar restaurant – might take the title of the city's most expensive.
Visitors dining at the Mandarin Oriental Jumeira restaurant can now order the 24-karat Golden Cigar with Almas Caviar, the rarest type of fish roe in the world.
Beluga's cigar-like dish is carefully rolled into shape before being oven-baked. The filling is constructed from a recipe that uses premium smoked salmon, yuzu, mustard, double cream and lime zest caviar. There’s also a dipping sauce, but according to the chefs at Beluga, the recipe for that is top secret. Rounding things off is a serving of Almas caviar – the rarest and most expensive caviar in the world.
The dish will set you back Dh1,550 but that almost seems like a bargain compared to the price of a 250-gram portion of Almas caviar. It retails in Beluga for Dh36,305.
Beluga is Dubai’s only caviar-dedicated restaurant, serving French cuisine with a modern twist and a fish-roe-centric menu.
The world's love for caviar stems from ancient times – the Persians were the first group of people to consume it, the ancient Greeks imported salt-cured roe from Crimea in southern Ukraine and the Romans credited it with medicinal properties.