Caviar

At caviar bars including Heritage Restaurant & Caviar Bar in Chicago, Huso in New York, and Caviar Bar in Charleston, old-school white tablecloths and ...

In caviar bars, those run by purists and those run by innovators, the consensus is that caviar is worthy of once again taking center stage. What makes it harder and costlier in this country are all the restaurants and caviar brands that source their eggs not from US-based farms, but from the Chinese company [Kaluga Queen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluga_Queen), the world’s largest mass producer of caviar. To contextualize the recent rise of caviar bars, you have to go back a few decades. “I have 500 people on the waiting list every night,” says Lo, whose winning Top Chef dish was Hamachi with vin jaune and, of course, caviar. That means bar stools instead of white tablecloths, caviar “bumps” to be slurped off the wrist, and chefs appearing with their sleeves rolled up to talk caviar with customers. But Petrillo is something of a caviar evangelist, whose objective, like Meikle and a growing number of other chefs and restaurateurs, is to change the product’s reputation. During the “caviar boom” of the early 1900s, the US had depleted its own sturgeon supplies. “When I got into the business in 2004, there were six farms on the planet,” Keane says. “Farmers went into the business and didn’t know how to market. There, you can grab a sturdy potato chip, scoop white sturgeon eggs straight from the tin, and enjoy the coveted “pop” on the roof of your mouth. Caviar can be a ton of fun,” he says. Those assumptions include the notion that caviar is quintessentially ‘80s and must be paired with a stretch limo.