How to eat and drink like the mega-rich: From £1m bottles of Champagne to £10,000-a-night hotel suites — the luxury business is booming… (but some of the 0.1% still insist on McNuggets and ‘behave like animals’)
- Tom Parker Bowles reveals the favourite haunts of the super-rich — and the incredible price-tags
- READ MORE: I spent two years serving the super-rich in Harrods
The catering on private jets is, in general, bloody appalling,’ a long-term jet-setter is telling me exasperatedly.
‘You pay nearly 50 grand for a flight to New York, and they serve up curling sandwiches and the sort of canapés that would be ashamed to show their face in Lidl.’
You would have been forgiven for thinking it was all Château Lafite and A5-grade wagyu beef but apparently not.
Many clients, my source continues, order takeaways to eat on board, not just from Zuma and Nobu, but McDonald’s and KFC too.
With a years-long waiting list, 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair is like a (very posh) home from home
‘The rich,’ mused F Scott Fitzgerald, ‘are different from you and me.’ To which Ernest Hemingway apparently replied, ‘Yes, they have more money.’
Apocryphal or not, there is no arguing that the mega rich, or 0.1% (meaning, for argument’s sake, a net worth of over £100 million) are not quite like others.
‘They exist not just in a different world,’ says one well-connected friend, ‘but a whole different solar system. All that money acts as insulation from the real world, a buffer from the dreary day-to-day grind.’
While the rest of the country battles ever-rising inflation and interest rates, as well as a desperate cost-of-living crisis, business at the top end is positively booming.
And nowhere is this clearer than in what that 0.1% put in their mouths and pour down their throats.
Vast suites (costing upwards of £10,000 a night) at Claridge’s, the Rosewood and The Londoner hotels have never been more packed.
Likewise, the high-end restaurants: from Scott’s (immaculate Mayfair fish, owned by Richard Caring) and The River Cafe (exquisite Italian food, at a price, and one of London’s great restaurants) to Amazonico (showy, over-the-top Amazon-themed theatrics) and Bacchanalia (Mayfair hedge-fund-heaven, themed around Ancient Greece, also owned by Caring).
Caviar sales, too, are in rude health. One top supplier recently flogged a whopping 66 kilos of Beluga (at around £5,000 a kilo) to a private client, while the waiting lists for clubs like Annabel’s (the new incarnation of the legendary Mayfair club, ornate, extravagant and very difficult to join), 5 Hertford Street (a discreet, elegant Mayfair home-from home, owned by Robin Birley) and Oswald’s (a beautiful dining club, also owned by Birley, and named after his portrait-painter grandfather) stretch for years.
Owned by Richard Caring, Baccchanalia, also in Mayfair, serves dishes fir for a Greek god
Britain is also now the private jet capital of Europe, with an aircraft taking off every six minutes.
It’s private all the way, darling, as you glide into Farnborough in Hampshire, a cool, calm oasis where luggage is whisked away upon arrival, along with passports, and your pilot escorts you to your plane.
On board, eschewing the usual below-par catering, you can tuck in to Strottarga Bianco caviar from the Siberian albino sturgeon which costs nearly £90,000 a kilo and comes with flakes of edible 22-carat gold.
Along with a bottle of incredibly silly champagne, Brut Goût de Diamants Chapuy, with its 18-carat white gold label and, wait for it, 19-carat diamond attached to the centre of the label. Yours for a mere million.
And maybe a bottle of Ô Amazon mineral water (made – seriously – from filtered Amazon air), a steal at £80.
And after you’ve devoured your Nobu New Style yellowtail sashimi (damned good, admittedly) and Zuma Honetsuki wagyu tomahawk steak (a mere £298), perhaps a piece of chocolate?
A To’ak Masters Series Enriquestuardo, to be precise, matured for eight years, unmissable at £380 for 50g.
At the other end, you climb straight into your Range Rover, airside (immigration is all but invisible), and glide to your hotel suite.
Ibiza’s Hï (‘the most technologically advanced club on the planet’) charges €50,000 for its top table
But these days, forget nebuchadnezzars of Dom Pérignon, accompanied by sparklers and the Star Wars theme tune, being borne to tables at pricey but public nightclubs like Les Caves du Roy in Saint Tropez.
Now the rich may be wealthier than ever, but it’s all about stealth wealth, or, as one newspaper put it, ‘inconspicuous consumption’. Meaning cash is still splashed, but behind firmly closed doors.
‘Private jets and super yachts not only ensure security and privacy,’ says a contact at a top concierge service, ‘but also allow you to indulge in all manner of lovely things, well away from the media’s prurient glare.’
Because at this level of wealth, the world is your corner shop. Cases of Pétrus 1982 (Hedonism Wines lists one bottle at £7,980) and bottles of 55-year-old Yamazaki whisky (one recently sold for £620,000).
White truffles, those pungently scented fungi, can cost up to £20 per gram, while a leg of the very finest Jamón Ibérico de Bellota, made from pigs fed on acorns, is around £3,600.
‘What money can’t buy,’ continues the concierge, ‘is access. Most of our members want to join Annabel’s, 5 Hertford Street or Oswald’s. But it doesn’t matter how much money you have.
‘To make it past these gilded doors, you have to pass muster with the committee.’
Priced at £1m, Brut Goût de Diamants Chapuy champagne has an 18-carat white gold label and 19-carat diamond attached to the centre of the label
And those committees (the identities of whom are kept top secret) are very picky indeed. ‘We look for the right sort of person,’ one club insider tells me.
‘People who we like, who will treat the staff with respect, and will add to rather than detract from the club.’
Alexander Spencer-Churchill of the Birley Clubs (which owns Annabel’s) is the man behind the Legacy Membership scheme.
Once approved, a one-off fee of up to £250,000 for life membership is paid, which includes husband and wife, plus three children.
They not only get access to the club’s special Legacy Room, but use of the concierge service too. Which ensures the best tables at any Caprice Holdings restaurant, including The Ivy, Scott’s and Harry’s Bar.
‘We were definitely ahead of our game when we created it,’ he says. ‘And it’s an incredible model, but not one we’ll see again. Members simply won’t spend that sort of money for a life membership.’
I ask if anyone with the cash could become a Legacy member. ‘Absolutely not. This is all about having the right people.’
I’m told that spending in the members’ clubs is rarely excessive – ‘They feel they’ve paid their dues with the membership,’ says another well-placed source. ‘So they don’t splurge.’
Elsewhere, however, the super-rich are more than happy to shell out £10,000 on a serious first-growth claret.
These are Bordeaux wines – Châteaux Lafite Rothschild, Latour, Margaux and Haut-Brion, which were designated Premier Cru in 1855, and Mouton, which was added in 1973 – in the likes of Scott’s or Wiltons, one of London’s grandest and oldest restaurants.
‘While they ensure guests know exactly how much the bottle costs, it’s poured into a decanter to hide it from jealous prying eyes’, explains a contact.
Some of the very rich prefer restaurants to come to them. ‘Every chef has a price,’ says another concierge. ‘Even the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver. And that is the ultimate dinner-party boast.’
Money, though, does not necessarily equate with generosity. ‘The super-rich can be very mean indeed,’ says a manager of one of London’s top hotels. ‘But in a different way.
‘They’ll spent £25,000 on a suite for the night and order silly, showy champagnes. But they’ll also nick anything that’s not tied down – bathrobes, Dyson hairdryer, speakers, even towels.
‘And it’s never those people in the normal rooms, always the ones in the suites. They do tip well, which is why the concierges love them. But they don’t respect them.’
He tells the story of one incredibly wealthy Middle Eastern family who brought cardboard boxes of Chicken McNuggets into the hotel restaurant and were outraged when they were asked to eat them in their room. ‘They just left and never came back.’
At one top London hotel caviar and lobster are ever popular on the room-service menu – but the cheeseburger is the bestseller
Another rich client demands his room be filled with thousands of pounds’-worth of Fortnum’s food, including ten tubes of Clotted Cream Digestive Biscuits.
‘The staff love it, as he never touches anything. And they can eat everything once he’s gone.’
But while caviar and lobster are ever popular on the room-service menu, ‘the cheeseburger is our bestseller by far’.
Behaviour, though, is often less than exemplary. ‘They feel that if they pay, they can do whatever they want,’ says my man behind the concierge desk. ‘And that once here, they can behave like animals.
‘I can’t begin to tell you the states they leave the rooms in. They arrive with their “nieces” and spend all their cash on sex and drugs.’
Old money, despite hating ostentation (‘So vulgar to bang on about money, dear boy’), can be careful with their cash.
Whereas the new money will flutter out £50 notes like confetti, you’ll be lucky tO get so much as a tenner from some of the grander lot.
They also tend to prefer the discreet elegance of Robin Birley’s clubs, 5 Hertford Street and Oswald’s, to the rather more flamboyant Annabel’s.
Where to splash the cash
£420
What it will cost you per head to eat at Sushi Kanesaka in Mayfair, Britain’s most expensive restaurant.
(Diners are banned from wearing perfume in case it affects the flavours.)
£94
Champagne tea at the Ritz per head.
£6 million
What Scott’s in Mayfair spent on building its private dining room. (The floors are made of semiprecious agate and there’s a Renoir on the wall.)
£72.6 billion
Value of the UK restaurant industry last year.
8
Number of three-star Michelin restaurants in the UK.
£28,000
The amount Zafferano, a Michelin-starred restaurant in London, paid for a single white truffle, only to let it rot in the fridge by mistake.
£86,177
What one bottle of The Macallan Single Highland Malt Whisky sold for in 2022.
When it comes to holidays, the South of France is perennially popular, and the Amalfi coast too. But it’s Ibiza where you’ll find the serious dollar.
‘The one thing you can’t buy there,’ explains one of the island’s most connected fixers, ‘is a reservation to Casa Jondal.’
A seriously upmarket beach restaurant, the food is exceptional. If outrageously expensive. But who cares about paying €5,000 for lunch when you’re shelling out €300,000 a week on your villa, set on its own private island.
It may sleep 18 and have a staff of 23, but expect to pay another €100,000 for the food, drinks and tips.
Chefs are flown in from London, Paris and Rome. Or ordered in from Cipriani. Meaning three cooks and a fleet of uniformed waiters, cooking for 12, costing €6,000 per meal.
As for a night out at one of the clubs – Hï (‘the most technologically advanced club on the planet’) charges €50,000 for its top table. Sure, you get up to 24 guests and unlimited booze. But seriously?
Those of a more discerning nature drop €20,000 for a table on Sunday night at Pacha, where the legendary DJ Solomun has a residency.
It seems like a comparative bargain.
There is, though, one problem that bedevils the super-rich – status anxiety.
They may have hundreds of millions in the bank, a cellar full of first-growth wines, an art collection to rival the Saatchi Gallery and a plane with its own double bed. But they still live in constant fear of being outdone.
Someone with a longer yacht, a faster jet, a bigger private island.
‘Despite all that cash,’ says my mole in the Loro Piana slacks, ‘they’re never truly happy.
‘Somewhere, somehow, there’s always someone to envy.’
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