Sofrito's $1,000 meal: Soooooo ten minutes ago!

Toward the end of his life, Salvador Dali prefigured the Jeff Koons-style artistic sellout by signing thousands of pieces of blank paper, which unscrupulous publishers subsequently used to print out cheap copies of his art. As equally unscrupulous art buyers bought the prints, Dali stated "If there are people who want to sell poor quality limited reproductions of my work, and others want to pay too much money for them, they deserve each other."

With this in mind, I have to admit that I'm sad to see the end of the ultra-expensive food trend. Although I was never able to buy the $1,000 bagel or the $150 burger, I've enjoyed poking fun at the ultra-arrogant people who have produced ridiculously expensive food itemsand the insanely rich people who have shelled out cash for them. Unfortunately, with the stock market bouncing up and down like Richard Simmons on coke, it seems unlikely that anybody will be in the mood to lay down the price of a plane ticket on a saffron-stuffed burrito or a bowlful of gold-plated chicken wings.

That having been said, every trend must give a few final convulsions before it is officially dead, and the super-pricey food trend is no different. With that in mind, I hereby salute Ricardo Cardona, the head chef at Sofrito, a New York restaurant. In what is either a concerted effort to kill this trend or the biggest case of self-delusion since Madonna tried acting, he has released a $1,000 paella. For that princely sum, patrons get a huge bowl of arborio rice, saffron, extra virgin olive oil, white asparagus, piquillo peppers, black truffles, sea scallops, baby squid, baby eel, mussels, cherrystone clams, king crab legs, mini-chorizo sausages, octopus, lobster tails, prawns, and Spanish ham.

Cardona has positioned the $1,000 paella as a celebration of Spanish cuisine; presumably, this means that Spanish cuisine basically consists of throwing a whole bunch of fairly pricey ingredients into a bowl and trying to charge ten times what they are worth. For that matter, since when are Alaskan prawns, King crab legs, Maine lobster, and locally-grown shellfish distinctively Iberian? On the other hand, only the coarsest of pedants would question Cardona's dedication to his culture when Sofrito is giving 20% of the proceeds from the paella to a nonprofit group that helps Latino youngsters. After all, when one subtracts $200 from a price tag of $1,000, that leaves Sofrito with a mere $800 gross from the meal. After taking out the $100 that the restaurant probably paid for the ingredients, their profit sinks to a mere $700. How can any restaurant possibly expect to stay in business with that kind of profit margin?