Who Do You Think You Are, The Pope?

This year’s conspicuous consumption, now with added Mickey Rourke:

OK, so you had a pretty good year, if not a Goldman Sachs $100 million–bonus good year. You can afford to gorge yourself like the overpaid, all-conquering hunter-gatherer you are. A number of pricier-than-thou steakhouses are stocking up on Wagyu “Kobe” beef flown in from Japan, not the knockoff American hybrids raised on ranches in Texas or Colorado. At Nello, on Madison Avenue, fourteen-ounce Wagyu sirloins have been selling for $750 a pop. That’s hardly an exorbitant markup, owner Nello Balan says, considering that after his chefs finally strip away the meat’s blubbery blanket of fat he is paying about $400 per pound. He also offers Wagyu dusted with white truffles. That goes for $1,050 (which would get you about three years’ worth of Lipitor).

“It’s really fucking good,” says Mickey Rourke, the actor and proud carnivore. He ordered one sirloin at Nello, and the buttery, foie gras–like beef was so exquisite he came back the next day, this time with a Romanian model in tow, for more. (“It didn’t even taste like steak,” he says.) Levent Piskiner, who owns the Fifth Avenue jewelry store Gilan, didn’t mind that his bill came to over $800. “It’s a miracle,” he says of the Wagyu, named after a noble strain of cattle from the Kobe region of Japan.