“Quattro Caviar” Has Such A Nice Ring To It

Staten Islanders are wildly uninterested in $1,000 pizza:

For $1,000, the city’s most prodigal foodies can get a lobster- and caviar-drenched pizza at Nino’s Bellisima on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

That works out to about $25 per bite of the four-slice, 12-inch pie — a price that prompted Staten Islanders interviewed yesterday to respond with “Huh?” then, incredulously, “What did they put on that pizza?” and finally the admission that they would be hard-pressed to swallow such an extravagance.

“I came up with the idea to have something the most spectacular, unique!” said Nino Selimaj, the owner of the joint where pies on the regular menu cost between $14 and $20, as well as five other restaurants in the city. “People didn’t used to think they would ever pay $300 for Asian fusion when they could get Chinese takeout and now they do it all the time.”

In his thick, Albanian accent, Selimaj boasted he had tried hundreds of different recipes before devising the dish, which he said costs about $720 in raw materials.

Served cold and compiled in about 20 minutes, the creation is crowned by creme fraiche, eight ounces of four different kinds of caviar — Petrossian, Beluga, Ossetra and Sevruga — and a two-pound Maine lobster tail sliced so thin that the glean of caviar can be seen through its translucent meat. The pieces are separated by chives and topped with a hint of wasabi and salmon roe.

. . .

Ayanna Phillip of Stapleton waxed poetic on what she would do with $1,000 instead of eating chichi pizza (“I’d pay my bills; I’d go shopping, you could buy, like, 100 outfits”) as she waited to pick up her order at one of the borough’s more economical pie emporiums, My Pizza in Concord — where a large pie goes for $8.

“I wouldn’t buy that pizza even if I was Bill Gates,” she said, scrunching up her face at the thought of a slice topped by caviar.

Meanwhile, Island pizza chefs make a good case for avoiding pretentious pie:

“One thousand is a little crazy; They’d be getting a bargain with our pie,” said Michael Costello, the chef and manager of Pizza on the Plaza, New Dorp, which sells, by all accounts the Island’s most expensive pie.

Pizza on the Plaza’s $100 dish features fontina cheese, arugula pesto, a couple ounces of shaved truffles and lobster meat. Since the item was unveiled last summer, one customer ordered a few of the pizzas for a Halloween Party; otherwise demand has been, to put it kindly, very slow.