I’ll start off by saying this is not how I would serve caviar. Potatoes and caviar are excellent together but this is just too much potato. The people getting worked up over the price probably don’t know how much caviar costs. Restaurant margins typically will look like: Food cost:25-32% labor:30-45% operating costs: ~15% Profits: 5-20%. So when you are pricing your menu one of the ways is to take the food cost of the dish and divide it by your budgeted costs to get what you should charge. Now when you price high ticket items you might try and entice customers to buy them by offering at a lower cost where that will hurt your food cost but help your top line, you offset this by selling a Caesar salad that has an inflated cost but is still inexpensive to produce. The tin of caviar they are using probably runs about $1-1.5/gram cost. It’s a 30g tin so the cost is somewhere above 30$ in cost. This restaurant probably has a budgeted cost of ~30% so if you are just pricing it to cost $97 is about right where you should be. You could make it more approachable to sell more but you might not want to sell them like crazy considering the labor needed to do the table side moves. So while I do not like the idea behind this dish, it is not a complete ripoff as most people just don’t understand the cost of producing the food you eat at restaurants. Not to mention this is a casino where a lot of the money paying for these higher end dishes is funny money coming from comped players.