Caviar and the potato chip: a different kind of attention

DINING

Ceremony is a way of telling you where to look. Take it away, and you find out whether you were looking at all.

Caviar on a potato chip has become the knowing gesture of the decade, from cocktail bars to private dinners: the most rarefied ingredient on the most ordinary object in the kitchen. It is easy to read as irony. It is more interesting to read as a test. The chip removes the mother-of-pearl spoon, the blini and the hush, and leaves the roe to speak for itself.

The chip is a decision

Petrossian, the Paris caviar house founded in 1920, took the pairing seriously enough to sell its own. The house says it spent years looking for a chip that would not fight the roe: too much salt overwhelmed it, too little left the bite flat, and some simply clashed with the butter and brine of the beads. It settled on chips made from native organic potatoes from the Andes.

That is the whole argument in miniature. The chip works when it is chosen, not when it is grabbed. Its crunch is a counterpoint to the soft pop of the egg; its salt has to stay below the salt of the caviar, not above it.

Which caviar

A casual frame does not excuse a vague label. Petrossian sorts its caviars first by sturgeon: Ossetra, Kaluga Huso hybrid, Persicus, which the house reintroduced to aquaculture in 2015, Alverta, Beluga hybrid and Daurenki. Then it grades each batch. An Ossetra and a Kaluga hybrid are not two price points of the same thing. They are different animals, with different textures and different finishes.

A simpler way of serving caviar does not require a simpler account of what is being served.

Species, producer, batch: that is the information worth keeping when the silver goes back in the drawer. The word caviar, on its own, says almost nothing.

What the ritual was for

Formal service focuses attention, but it also makes some guests anxious about getting it right. The chip lifts that weight. Everyone knows how to pick one up, and the mind is freed for the contrast in the mouth.

The risk runs the other way. Informality can become theatre, a pairing chosen because it photographs as high meets low. When the roe disappears under a heavily flavoured crisp, the picture has replaced the tasting, and the caviar has become a garnish with a price tag.

A simpler frame, the same standard

The best version is restrained: a plain, well-made chip, a modest spoonful, a caviar you can name. Nothing more is needed, and nothing less will do.

Take the ceremony away and the question remains the one it always was. Are you looking? On a good chip, with a good caviar, the answer is more honest than any silver spoon could make it.

Details and further reading: Petrossian chips · Petrossian caviar guide

GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.