So I was thinking that for most people, at least in the US, surf and turf is considered to be the go to food to represent a luxury meal for people who aren’t wealthy. In the US that meal consists of a high quality steak like filet mignon and lobster.
For people who are wealthy, or for people in different cultures are there foods that are considered the stereotypical luxury meal? Are steak and lobster considered luxury foods in Europe, Africa or Asia?
Rich people can afford things like Kobe beef, caviar or truffles, which most non-rich people generally cannot. So the concept of a kobe beef steak isn’t really something most non-wealthy people even consider. I’d assume filet mignon is the highest quality steak most people will ever see.
Tenderloin is perhaps even better than filet mignon.
Kobe beef is probably the most expensive beef by weight.
I think it is something on the order of $33/oz.
I have eaten a sashimi dinner that cost more than $200.
With sake and wine the entire total for 4 people was well over $1000.
Fortunately, my company picked up the tab.
And for the record, my team won the contract so it was well worth the expense.
Surf and turf is an import from the US to the UK, and is genrally associated with mid range steak houses (and a bit of an oddity). So no, it wouldn’t be considered a luxury meal. However, individually, steak and lobster are expensive. I would say lobster is regarded as more of a luxury than steak, though.
Not sure you can lump together people who are wealthy and people from other cultures.
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I would say, if you wanted to invite people over and impress them, maybe future in-laws, for eg, you would probably serve a roast rib of beef. My mother always serves Beef Wellington to foreign guests.
Caviar, truffles, foie gras, and yes Kobe beef. My son noticed a $60 hamburger made from Kobe beef in Vegas a couple days ago. But I think that their real extravagance is in the $500 bottles of wine. When NY Times food writer had a $4000 dinner around 1965 (a staggering amount of money in those days), most of the cost was in the wine. They opened 3 bottles of insanely expensive pre-phylloxera wines (Great French Wine Blight - Wikipedia) to find one that was still drinkable and they also opened a bottle of Napolean brandy that really was from Napolean’s era. Also much of the cost of their super-expensive meals lies in the fancy prep, not necessarily in especially costly ingredients.
In Spain, not so much a meal as certain locations: many dishes which are considered “very good food” can be had in places ranging from five-fork restaurants to roadhouses, but if the one in the five-forker isn’t our of this world you’re allowed to glare very coldly at the maitre. El Bulli has closed shop, but while I doubt a Spaniard in a million (excluding former employees of the place) can name a single dish that was cooked there, “a place where you need to make reservations more than a year in advance” and where a meal could cost more than the median monthly income certainly counted as “luxury”.
I had a project in Costa Rica; the consulting firm was a Spanish one. When the Costa Ricans visited, the Spaniards took them to a superb restaurant which specializes in shellfish; there’s some fish as well, but if you don’t eat any kind of fish it’s not the place for you. Turns out that Costa Ricans barely eat fish (other than ceviche), had no idea what most of the things in the menu were and ended up ordering sole meuniere (which I’ve also seen listed as Dover sole)… When the Costa Ricans told me this story, I relied it back with a note to remember that what you consider superb may not always be the best option.
Not “top of the line”, but one of our Thai friends told us that chicken with cashew nuts (gai pad med mamuang himapaan) has a reputation for being a “rich” dish, because the cashews are more expensive. A dish of it in a standard restaurant might cause 40-50 baht instead of the normal 20-30, for example. Otherwise, Western food seemed to be more “prestigious” for being exotic.
I have no idea what Kobe beef is and I was raised on a farm with beef and mutton.
I’ve seldom ever ordered crayfish (lobster for Northern Hemisphere) because its so expensive. Oysters are high end, scallops nice but over-priced. Steak is fine food when cooked medium rare. I think paua (abalone) is expensive but not to my taste.
My choice given my druthers is a carpetbag steak which includes oysters and scallops. Not outrageously expensive ($35) and yummy.
Crayfish/crawfish/crawdads are freshwater crustaceans, while lobsters are salt water, and much bigger. Or at least that’s the way it is in North America.
Lobsters were not always considered a luxury. Lobster used to be served frequently to servants, children, and the poor, who complained about the frequency of lobster on the menu. Yes, I’m serious.
In Taiwan, if you want to go expensive, seafood is the way to go. Lobster is pretty midscale, though: I never saw what the big deal was with lobster, and in these parts you can get it at almost any hotel buffet. Bland, bland bland. Now, those snow crabs with two foot legs, that’s something.
In Germany what you’d use as a cliché for a luxury meal would be oysters and caviar, but what really constitutes a luxury meal is eating in a high-class restaurant (i.e. 3 Michelin stars or 4 Gault-Millau toques) - not a separate class of foodstuffs but very, very well prepared food.
My first time in Jamaica, the breakfast chef served eggs. I heard from several people that eggs were considered a luxury item. At least then, there were no commercial egg facilities, so they were shipped in.
When I visited China’s Jiangsu province, the dishes that were meant to be impressive seemed to be shark fin soup and the female Chinese mitten crab. I’ve also heard abalone is supposed to be a status symbol.
The OP wording confused me, also, and I’m American. Surf and turf per se isn’t upscale; you can have (relatively) cheap surf and turf with cheap beefsteak and shrimp. You can get that at a lot of midrange restaurants.
But if your turf is filet mignon and your surf is lobster, then I agree, that’s upscale, and about as upscale as a middle-class stiff like me would ever get.
Pakistan, hard to say and it varies across the country. What is a staple or a poor mans food in some part may be seen as a high end food in others. case in point, Niharai and Sajji two fairly run of the mill things in the south, which are eaten in more expensive places up north. Certain types of foreign food maybe, but not even then, certain ethnic foods are very common.
I would say it’s the resturant which defines how high class is, rather than the ingredients or even the menu. I have had leg of lamb at roadside eateries. And high price places.
Gordon Ramsay did a program called Gordon’s Great Escape in which he traveled around India and learned to cook various dishes. One of these was in Lucknow and showed the preparation of an elaborate biryani for a “small” wedding of a thousand guests. It involved two whole goats, stuffed with chicken, quail and eggs, and cooked over rice. It looked really good. My guess is that this qualifies as luxury food for non-veg Indians. (Did I mention that it looked really good? My mouth waters just remembering what it looked like on TV.)
Kobe beef isn’t available in the US. Due to lack of control of the name, you can call other stuff “Kobe beef” as in “Kobe style beef” but it doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot.