Let Them Eat Caviar: Why Is Auckland Suddenly So Obsessed With Fish Eggs?

Your guide to the condiment that costs $100 a teaspoon.

Guy de Saint Laurent flicks the torch on his mobile phone and runs the beam across his plate.

The caviar sparkles.

“Like diamonds,” he says, approvingly.

Gleaming sturgeon eggs are heaped on a blackcurrant crisp filled with duck liver mousse. There is a tiny pastry with comte custard, and a potato starch cup full of trevally and green strawberry. They are all topped with caviar.

Last month, at Sidart restaurant in Ponsonby, Auckland, guests paid $250 to eat caviar with everything. The canapes were stage one of a six-part dinner that paired one of the world’s most luxurious ingredients with the likes of raw wagyu, confit leeks and egg yolk, grey mullet, seared venison and a softly lucious cheese ice cream with raspberry, apple and honeycomb.

By the end of the evening, chef Lesley Chandra had artfully dolloped nearly one kilogram of caviar — the translucent, umami-rich sturgeon eggs that took almost seven years to grow.

True caviar costs upwards of $100 a tablespoon. What makes it so expensive? Where does it come from? And why is it all over Auckland menus right now?

When Bivacco opened in the viaduct, caviar accompanied its mozzarella sticks; in late December, the ricotta cannoli at Esther had been dipped in caviar. And — if the sales at Maison Vauron in Newmarket were anything to go by — sturgeon eggs also graced plenty of private dinner party plates over summer.

Fossil remains suggest caviar has been around since the dinosaurs but, in Aotearoa New Zealand, it is only just coming of age.

“I think a lot of Kiwis are really uneducated about caviar,” said chef Chandra, as he prepared for the Sidart dinner. “We didn’t really grow up with it here and it’s a new thing for us — kind of like the truffle was a couple of years ago. I think there is more and more being used, but sometimes the quality is not good. Restaurants like ours have to show proper caviar and not just coloured black fish eggs.”

Enter Monsieur de Saint Laurent and his cellphone torch.

Worldwide, there are 27 species of sturgeon but, according to the commercial director for Sturia (the company that has been fish farming in France for the past 30 years), not all eggs are created equal — and some “caviar” is not even from sturgeon.

The unfertilised eggs of everything from salmon to lumpfish are commonly called caviar; so too are the citrus pearls of Australia’s finger limes, and the crunchy, salty, squid ink-infused roe of the flying fish.

To the connoisseur, caviar can only come from sturgeon. It’s a fish with an ancient lineage, but the shorter history of “real” caviar begins with the 16th-century Russian Empire’s appetite for the eggs of the sturgeons that swam in the Caspian Sea.

Eventually, countries like France, China and the United States would begin harvesting their own homegrown products but the Caspian’s wild fishery has always been the most prized and, ultimately, the most devastated by human greed. In 1998, the year all sturgeon were granted protection under CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) it was reported that stocks had dropped to less than 1000 tonnes. A decade later, wild sturgeon fishing was completely banned.

It’s another stormy Auckland Friday when Viva is invited to a private tasting session, upstairs at Maison Vauron, the French wine and produce retailer. Three tins are arranged on ice. De Saint Laurent cuts the seals and cracks them open like he’s shucking oysters. I make a fist and a generous pile of caviar is spooned onto the base of my thumb.

Caviar “bumps” are the latest word in luxury. “Why are some diners licking fish roe from their fists?” asked the New York Times, last American summer. The reported answer, from the owner of NoHo’s iconic Temple Bar who was dishing the stuff out at US$20 a mouthful: “It’s decadence on decadence but not unapproachable.”

Should I sniff the caviar? Definitely not, says de Saint Laurent. “Caviar shouldn’t smell. Smelling is not a good thing!”

I slurp as delicately as possible, rolling the fish eggs around my tongue and pressing them lightly against the roof of my mouth. They don’t so much “pop” as melt. The Baerii (marketed as “vintage”) is smooth and creamy, the Ossetra more complex. Saltier? A tiny bit more bitter? Tasting notes reveal that “iodine” is the word I’m looking for. Either way, it’s crucial to take a second serve. Like wine, it’s that next mouthful you really taste. The flavours explode and, afterwards, my palate feels blurry and lush, like I’ve just eaten a poached egg yolk.

“It’s a product that you don’t cook,” says de Saint Laurent. “You use this product to create emotion for the customer. You combine it with other things and it’s like a condiment. A chef has to be humble in order to highlight the caviar and not hide it.”

At home, he suggests, keep it simple. Lukewarm poached eggs. A milky burrata, split in half and splodged with good olive oil. Beef tartare or white fish; mashed potato and sour cream. You will, he promises, always remember your first taste of the real stuff.

Beluga is wildly expensive — three times more costly than the two caviars I’ve already tasted. The eggs are slightly bigger and a pretty charcoal grey. Come October, tins of them will be back on the shelves for Maison Vauron’s pre-Christmas shoppers.

Ready?

I get marmite and butter on warm but slightly undercooked Vogel’s. Perfectly savoury, perfectly creamy. A full 10 minutes later and the back of my throat is pure Bluff oyster. Clean, rich, briny. I’m walking to a bus stop doing calculations in my head and trying to decide whether I love Beluga caviar — or just the $300-per-15g idea of it.

If caviar is a condiment, what makes it more special than salt and/or butter?

“Caviar emits a magical history,” says de Saint Laurent. “When you have caviar, you have a part of history . . . and when you do a nice pairing, you can have something unexpected. We have all had an oyster in the mouth that was just magical. Butter can’t produce that. Caviar, yes.”

Depending on the sturgeon species, Sturia’s 45 farmers must wait 2-7 years before they can even determine the sex of their fish. Every specimen is ultrasounded. Males are sold for meat and the females are farmed in ponds, living on a diet that is 61 per cent plant-based and 38 per cent marine animal protein for another 5-12 years.

Further ultrasounds and an egg biopsy (in which the roe is checked for taste and quality) dictate when the caviar will be harvested. Fish are stunned before they are killed, their egg-carrying gonads are removed, and the caviar is selected for colour (gold-green-charcoal-grey), size (a minimum of 2.5mm) and firmness. Once harvested, there is just a four-hour window for sieving, rinsing, weighing and salting — any longer, and the eggs will turn to mush. The fish meat is then sold to restaurants, and the skin used for luxury leather goods.

It might be possible to grow caviar in New Zealand. But, says de St Laurent, a farmer would have to be patient — and have a high tolerance for risk.

“The luxury is in the rarity.”

Just before I inhaled my own Beluga bump, I sent photos to a friend. “It looks like a munted blackberry,” she replied. And she was not wrong. If you want to eat caviar with your eyes, order it in a restaurant. And if you want to know whether it’s the real thing?

“It should have a high price point,” says Lesley Chandra. “There shouldn’t be a low price point, because that’s impossible.”

At the Sidart dinner, Chandra used up to 10g of caviar on every individual dish but says a more normal serve might be just under a teaspoonful.

“I guess we treat it like a seasoning and, being a premium product, people are like, ‘Yep, I’ll try it. I’ll give it a go’.”

The “caviar” you can buy in a supermarket for $6.99 a tin is made from lumpfish roe. It’s usually dyed black or bright red and the texture is slightly crunchy. More commonly found on restaurant menus is locally grown salmon caviar — soft orange pops of deliciousness, scattered on everything from oysters to cream sauces. Real caviar offerings in Auckland frequently come from Sterlet, a species of sturgeon that produces smaller eggs, but still commands a high price point.

All of the chefs Viva spoke to agreed — New Zealand’s appetite for caviar is in its infancy and, currently, that translates to limited supply options.

“We have less availability here,” says Josh Emett. “For us to get variation in New Zealand, you need demand. With more people putting it on the menu, hopefully that creates demand.”

At Emett’s restaurant Onslow, the fried chicken with spicy pickles and caviar will cost you $18. The caviar component of that dish, the chef estimates, is at least $10.

“It’s one of those things you’re not necessarily focussed on making money off, but it is a thing I really enjoy serving . . . It’s always available if you know to ask.”

Emett says he “absolutely loves” caviar.

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“I like the saltiness, the fishiness, the point of difference. It has such a great flavour and there’s a really interesting variation of flavour between different caviars.”

London, 2001. Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s has just opened and Emett is in the kitchen: “I think that’s when I really started eating caviar. We went through tins and tins and tins and tins of it. We were very generous. We had so much fun. We had a chef’s table, and the customers would be in front of us and we’d literally just serve them a big portion on their plates and then throw the tin on the table and tell them to go for it if they wanted more.”

Emett says while he’ll sometimes pile caviar on top of an oyster or stir it through the end of a sauce (“you can’t boil it — it turns it into little bullets”), he loves the juxtaposition of “down and dirty” fried chicken and a truly luxurious ingredient. And at home? He too advises keeping it simple.

“We had a night in lockdown actually, where we just had Champagne, caviar and blinis . . .”

The highbrow-lowbrow approach to the world’s most expensive fish egg is perfected at Parnell’s Alpha, where chef Ed Verner takes flattened Japanese milk bread, stacks it with slices of “plastic” cheese and then carpets the lot with honeyed balsamic and caviar. It’s $45 for two grilled cheese fingers and, yep, that cheese is definitely the same supermarket stuff more commonly found in burgers and school lunchboxes.

“We cover it with a LOT of caviar!” says Verner. “People love it and everyone has to order it.”

Verner, who also operates Boxer and Pasture, says small restaurants like his rely on high individual head spends.

“So we do have quite a few supplements on the menu. You can have more truffles and extra caviar . . .”

Recently, he says, he rolled sorrel leaves, froze them in liquid nitrogen then filled them with cacao butter and caviar. Right now, he’s doing an agedashi tofu-inspired steamed omelette, topped with caviar and served with a roasted yeast dashi. At Boxer, a caviar-topped doughnut comes and goes from the menu.

But, says Verner: “We haven’t seen anything yet. The rise of caviar is something that’s happened worldwide in the last five years and some of the stuff I’ve had abroad is amazing. I love the umami-ness of it, how it just coats your mouth and runs into sauces. It just eats really nicely . . . but it’s not cheap. If you’re seeing it in a cheaper restaurant, it’s definitely not real caviar.”