Feast Your Eyes on 5 of the Most Insanely Expensive Menu Items in America

There are those restaurants and bars you choose when you’re celebrating. And then there are the ones you choose when you’re really celebrating — like when you seal a major deal (or hit the PowerBall) and you seriously need to make it rain. When you’re in the market for some over-the-top indulgence, you're going to need one of the most expensive menu items in America. Try one of these five crazy spendy dishes and drinks from restaurants and resorts around the country. (And when you’re done, obviously, make like Foodgod or Jay-Z's very lucky server... and snap a picture of the bill for your Insta feed!)

Photo: Anthony Mair

Let’s get this out of the way first: If you want to indulge in this over-the-top menu item, you’ll have to be a high roller. Of course, that’s because $688 for a bowl of soup is pretty steep… but also because it’s only offered at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas’ Talon Club, where dining is only available to VIP gaming clientele. With that out of the way, what is it? Ingredients include black-skinned chicken breast, longan berry, red date in an earthy, tea-like broth — and a quarter ounce of Cordyceps in every bowl. Cordyceps is a fungus and picked in the Himalayan Mountains — and the particular type used in the soup comes in the form of caterpillars that were overtaken by the fungus — which has the ability to overtake hosts. Value? $10,000 per gram — literally worth more than gold.

Let’s start with the good news: If you have $1,200 to spend on a single menu item, you can in indulge in this dish at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas even if you don’t have special Talon Club access. It’s available at the Rose.Rabbit.Lie supper club, where the name of the game is over-the-top and interactive performances throughout dinner —think lounge singers and tap dancers performing on top of pianos. (Don’t come looking for quiet romance or candlelight; this place is for the high-energy set.) If you find yourself a winner on the casino floor, march right upstairs with your crew and score the enormous whole Alaskan crab, which can feed up to 12. It’s served with lobster two ways, crab salad, black truffles, and caviar. 

Environmentally friendly and organic ice cream company Three Twins is here to offer an ice cream sundae that comes with a whole lot more: For $60,000 you’ll travel to the summit of Africa's highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro, where Three Twins Ice Cream founder Neal Gottleib will hand churn a batch of ice cream with glacial ice from the mountain's summit. The mountain's glaciers are predicted to disappear within the next 10 to 15 years due to climate change, and your purchase helps raise awareness of this fact with a five-figure contribution to an African environmental nonprofit. The sundae's price also includes first-class airfare to Tanzania, five-star accommodations, a guided climb, as much ice cream as you can eat, and a souvenir T-shirt made from organic cotton. It almost sounds like a bargain when you consider all that, right?

Norma’s restaurant within New York’s Le Parker Meridien hotel offers the ultimate hangover food when money is no object. The Zillion Dollar Lobster Frittata is like a regular diner omelette… except it’s packed with lobster tail and 10 ounces of caviar and it costs $2,000. (For a scant $200, you can have the same dish with one ounce of caviar.)

New York’s Serendipity 3's epic sundae comes in a Baccarat Harcourt crystal goblet with an 18K gold spoon. The dish consists of three scoops of rich Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream infused with Madagascar vanilla beans, covered in 23K edible gold leaf, drizzled with Amedei Porceleana chocolate, and covered with chunks of rare Chuao chocolate. It’s all is suffused with exotic candied fruits from Fauchon in Paris, gold dragets, and chocolate truffles. Topping it all off is a tiny glass bowl of Grande Passion caviar, which is salt-free, sweetened, and infused with fresh passion fruit, orange and Armagnac and served with a petite mother of pearl spoon and topped with a gilded sugar flower. The $1,000 masterpiece is served by appointment only.