Ridiculously Expensive Foods You Should Try At Least Once

Potatoes aren't often considered a luxury food, but these little yellow potatoes from the small French island of Noirmoutier are the most expensive in the world. La Bonnotte potatoes only grow in the island's mineral-rich coastal soil, and they're so fragile that they have to be carefully cultivated and harvested by hand during a brief period of peak ripeness in the early days of May.

The appeal of the potatoes is their distinctly salty flavor, which is said to pair especially well with another of the world's most expensive foods, caviar. The potatoes are sold for around $45 a pound when they're in season, but remember, the harvesting season is only about a week long. The best of the harvest is often sold at the Paris auction house Drouot, where it can reach prices as high as $300 per pound. which in everyday terms means that a large serving of McDonald's french fries made with these potatoes would set you back about $18 at a good time of year and $115 at a bad time. (Bad for your wallet, but good for your taste buds.) If you have the cash, the caviar may be a more appropriate serving suggestion.

If you've become numb to the shock of what a large Americano costs you from a mega chain coffee shop, imagine paying about $25 for your morning joe. That's what the beans for a 20-ounce cup of Esmeralda Especial coffee would set you back when it reached its highest price of $350.25 a pound at auction in 2013. Since few coffee shops actually serve Esmeralda Especial coffee over the counter, you're going to be paying closer to $40 for a 10-ounce bag of beans from a roaster, so you may not want to pour yourself a venti!

While another of the world's most expensive coffees, kopi luwak, famously earns its price from the novelty of having its beans processed through a civet's digestive tract and picked out of poop, Esmeralda Especial is expensive because it's actually really good. It comes from a particular leaf rust-resistant strain of Ethiopian beans planted at an unusually high elevation at an estate in Panama, and these unique circumstances give the coffee notes of bergamot, citrus, and stone fruits. Esmeralda Especial has won multiple tasting awards, so it's a taste that every die-hard coffee lover should treat themselves to at least once.

Even the very best cheeses in the world are generally only going to set you back about $50 a pound, unless there's something about them that makes them exceptionally scarce. That's the case for pule, a crumbly smoked white cheese from Serbia, which has sold for as much as several hundred dollars a pound because it's made from the milk of an endangered source: the Balkan donkey. It takes several gallons of milk to make 1 pound of cheese.

Pule gained notoriety in 2012 when someone started a rumor that Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic bought up the entire supply. It wasn't true, but it made for a good headline. It was good news for the donnkeys, as sales of the cheese support the donkey sanctuary in Zasavica in its efforts to become self-sustaining. Pule is perhaps more expensive than its modest and pleasant flavor demands, but knowing that eating it is helping the endangered donkeys it comes from should leave a good taste in your mouth.

Japanese Kobe beef became a hot food trend a few years ago, as people suddenly became aware of a category of delicate, delicious, well-marbled steaks they hadn't sampled before. Such was the fervor that suddenly everything was Kobe, and every gastro pub and fancy bar put Kobe sliders or Kobe brisket on its menu. Yet real Kobe was almost impossible to find outside Japan. At more than $300 per pound, real Kobe would be wasted if you ground it up for burgers or served it under a sauce.

Kobe beef comes from a strictly controlled strain of Japanese wagyu cattle raised in the Kobe region in Japan. In 2016 only nine restaurants in the U.S. were licensed to sell it, but any version of fullblood wagyu is probably worth checking out if you want an extraordinary taste experience. Like Kobe, the term "wagyu" has been degraded by overuse and branding. It often refers the product of crossbreeding between wagyu cattle and other breeds. The term "fullblood" tells you that your steak comes from pure wagyu cattle stock, though the cattle may be reared anywhere in the world. At about $100 a pound, the beef will still carry that mouth-wateringly intense level of marbling that makes wagyu irresistible. Just don't waste it on a meatball!

Coffin Bay Oyster Farm, located in a sheltered peninsula on the South Australia coastline, describes its king oysters as having the strong aroma of the rugged southern ocean and a complex flavor that makes it "the oyster steak of the ocean." But what makes these oysters truly remarkable is their size: a single Coffin Bay king oyster in its shell can weigh as much as 2 pounds and can cost the equivalent of about $75 in U.S. currency.

Coffin Bay king oysters are so huge and expensive because they're allowed to grow for up to six years. They have a lot more meat than a typical oyster, so some chewing is required and the scale of them may be more than some diners can stomach, but they certainly belong on the bucket list of any devoted oyster fanatic. The catch is that you'll have to make your way down to Australia's Eyre Peninsula, where these giants are sold exclusively at local restaurant Sarin's. The good news is that you get to keep the oyster shell as a souvenir.

There's no denying that we do love our bargain pizzas. Sometimes, you just can't be bothered: after a long day, a Little Caesars' Hot-n-Ready can be just the thing to hit the spot. And that makes it tough to justify spending a ton of money on something as standard as a pizza... but there's at least one pizza out there that comes with a hefty price tag that we can say is absolutely worth it.

We're talking about the Steveston Pizza Company's C6, which retails at a whopping $850. (Don't worry, the Vancouver pizza shop also has more affordably-priced pies, too.) This 12-inch, 10-slice pizza feeds around five people, chef Nader Hatami says (via MacLean's), and if you're a true lover of all things seafood, it's a must-have. It's piled high with tiger prawns, smoked steelhead, Osetra caviar, lobster ratatouille, and finished off with Italian white truffles.

Now it sounds worth it, right? Buyer beware, though, you can't just show up and order this bad boy off the menu — you'll have to give them a day's notice. If that's a little too steep, you might want to opt for the Storm pizza: at just $100 a pie, you'll still get a pizza loaded with shrimp, crab legs, lobster, and salmon. Pizza will never be quite the same.

You've heard of Waygu and Kobe beef, but it's entirely possible those aren't the most delicious types of beef you can buy. Competing for that honor is the beef that comes from the Blonde Aquitaine cows that are raised and slaughtered by only a single butcher on a single family farm in France.

According to CNN, Alexandre Polmard is the sixth-generation butcher of the family business founded in 1846. They weren't always putting out such high-end meats, and things really kicked off into the luxury level in the 1990s, when they developed a new way of treating the meat. It's called hibernation, and the meat is basically stored in a super cold, super windy environment that — reportedly — allows the meat to be stored, unchanged for any time.

There's a little more to it than that, too. The cows are hand-reared, live in the forests and grasslands of France, and slaughtered (only a rate of four cows per week) in a million-dollar facility designed to make the process as stress-free as possible. That's supposed to keep acid levels in the meat at a minimum, and those who can afford the price (up to $3,200) say that it absolutely works.