The World’s Most Expensive Pizzas

“Pizza pizza, go in my tummy, me so hungie, me so hungie.”

 ~The Worst

While America can’t lay claim to the invention of pizza, we certainly eat it better than anyone else.  Pizza has become an integral dietary requirement of drunks and stoners alike, and even if Pizza Hut gets a little weird with it overseas, it is a simple yet effective grease-delivery advice.  At its core, pizza is just bread, cheese, sauce, and whatever topping you want to choose in order to start arguments with the coworkers who are also stuck working late with you.

Of course, people say the same thing about hamburgers, and look what rich people have done to that.  That’s right, America, it’s time to take out your monocles, practice your best “Character from Monopoly” accent, and try to contain your natural inclinations to begin a class war, as we present you with…

The World’s Most Expensive Pizzas

When ordering a pizza, most of us have a budget somewhere between “how many gallons of grease can I get for every dollar spent” and “I want to impress my date, so a twenty dollar deep dish pizza it is, then!”  This is largely for the same reason that most of us buy tooth brushes instead of bribing third world adoption facilities to get you an army of underprivileged children trained to scrape away all your dental plaque every night using their tiny little malleable fingers.

Of course, if you can afford the health insurance for your poison-testing butler, you’ll probably have no problem shelling out for a slice or two of these exorbitantly priced pies.

Gordon “Fucking” Ramsay’s Commercially Available $178 Pizza

When you go to eat in London, you expect to eat either some hodgepodge of animal intestines with all the semblance of flavor broiled out of it or something that tastes good while a former soccer player yells obscenities at you.  True to form, if you head to Gordon Ramsay’s London restaurant, Maze, you will find what the folks at Guinness incorrectly label as the most expensive pizza in the world, coming in at $178 per pie.

The pizza itself, which is available on the restaurant’s everyday menu with no advanced notice needed if you order it, is baked in a wood fire and topped with onion puree, fontina cheese, baby mozzarella, pancetta, mushrooms, white truffle paste, pickled mizuna lettuce, and a letter from Gordon Ramsay personally informing you that, even though you just spent nearly two hundred bucks on a pizza, your date clearly is not impressed as she and the chef are currently entwined in the physical act of love in the nearest broom closet.  As you take your first bite and notice the empty seat in front of you, you can’t help but think that onion paste doesn’t sound like a very fancy ingredient to put on such an expensive pizza.

The $450 Pizza That’s Covered In Lobster And Caviar

How many of you have actually had caviar?  Like, the actual expensive, Russian sturgeon, kind?  Not to be vulgar, but it sort of tasted like fish vagina, didn’t it?  We’re not saying it tastes bad, we’re just saying that we suspect a lot of the reason why people pay so much for it is because it’s viewed as a rich-person thing to eat, as opposed to just fish eggs that taste like sorta like a fish’s snatch until you put a dab of sour cream with it.

So maybe we’ve established ourselves as biased, but we think that putting caviar on a pizza seems like a waste of both the pizza and the fish vajayjay.  Steveston Pizza Company out in British Columbia, Canada, clearly feels differently, as they have concocted a $450 pizza that is covered with Lobster Thermidor (“Thermidor” being a method of preparation that is French for “if you haven’t heard of this, you can’t afford it”), black Alaskan cod, and some Russian Osetra (douchebag/Russian for “sturgeon.”  Just say sturgeon) caviar.  Unlike Gordon “fucking” Ramsay’s pizza, this one needs to be ordered a day in advance (because, typically, Lobster Thermidor takes about a day to prepare), and while it’s not been flying off the shelves, as of June, 2012, at least one person has actually sat down and ordered this pizza.  That person was described by this pizza’s chef, Nader Hatami, as “A very rich person,” which of course is code for “this guy was the worst.”

If you ever drunkenly approach a well-dressed stranger and, for no discernible reason, punch him in the face, it’s probably because you could tell that he’s the man that ordered this pizza, no doubt while saying something like, “I bet this pizza costs more than your rent” to his waiter before taking his first bite.  And you’d totally be in the right for hitting him, because fuck that guy.

If You Spend $1,000 On A Pizza, You Still Have To Pay Your High-End Escort For Her Services At The End Of The Night

Taking things back to America (“It’s about time, AFFotD!”) we have the Bellisimia Pizza from Nino’s Restaurant in New York City, a pizza costs as much as renting out a skywriter to spell out the words “Fuck You Poor People, haha!” assuming you don’t mind hiring non-union.  Because it would be patently absurd to expect to pay that much for a pizza without it sounding like it would taste disgusting, the pizza has $820 worth of six different kinds of caviar, while also being covered with lobster, salmon, and wasabi paste, because if you’re going to spend $1,000 dollars to have a pizza served to you by the love child of Joe Pesci and Grandpa Munster, it might as well sound horrible.

We have to give these pizza chefs credit though—have you noticed how small all these pizzas look?  Seriously, you’re making people pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for a pizza, and you can’t scrounge together enough ingredients to cover an 18-inch pie?

Why Put Gold On A Pizza?  Uh…Look Over There, TRUFFLES!

Margo’s Pizzeria in Malta decided to make a thin crust pizza with white truffles, buffalo mozzarella, and 24-carat gold leaf and sell it for a cool $2,382.66, because it would be too easy to just charge three grand for it.  According to the linked article, the pizza, “has already been ordered twice by a local hotelier, who had to be persuaded not to have tomatoes on the pizza, as the acidity clashes with the taste of the truffles.”

You can roll your eyes at the pizzeria that decides to make a tomato-less pizza covered in gold and charge over $2,000 for it, but you can’t help but legitimately loathe the man who sees a pizza retail for that much and decides, “I’m going to buy this, but first, let’s see if I can have them change the ingredients first.  And then I’m going to try again.”  This pizza has to be ordered a week in advanced (but hey, at least they’ll include delivery costs if you want to eat it at home and away from the hungry eyes of those lesser plebeians you feel such contempt for), which also means that this nameless hotelier had to twice pick up the phone, call Margo’s and say, “Hey, I’d like to buy your gold covered pizza.  Yes, next week is fine.  And can you make it lousy with tomatoes?  Are you sure?  I really like tomato sauce on my pizza.  No, I don’t know what a truffle is, I just wanted to purchase this pizza to compensate for the emotional void that I’m constantly trying and failing to fill with material items.”

At Least This Pizza Is For Charity

James Bond is pretty cool.  He shoots people, sleeps with exotic women, and drinks martinis until he finds a way to make millions by ordering a goddamn Heineken.  But one thing you never see James Bond do is eat a slice of pizza.  Think about it, have you ever seen someone take a bite out of a pizza and thought, “Oh man, that was so suave and cool.”  No.  It’s impossible to look badass while stabilizing the front end of the pizza with one hand and awkwardly tilting your head to take that first chomp.  So while we can forgive Chef Domenico Crolla of Glasgow for making a $3700 pizza back in 2006 for charity, we have to question why he’d want to name it the “Pizza Royale 007.”

Crolla says the name comes because Bond is luxurious, much like this pizza, which is topped with champagne-soaked caviar, cognac-marinated lobster, an organic sunblush tomato base, Scottish smoked salmon, medallions of venison and, you guessed it, delicious, odorless, flavorless gold sprinkles.  We can’t speak too ill of this pizza, just because it was made to raise funds for a charity that finds ways to prevent curable blindness in developing countries, but seriously, what a stupid ass name.  Pizza Royale.  Groan.

Pizza Hut Wants You To Propose At A Pizza Hut (And Possible Conceive A Son In Their Bathroom)

There’s nothing particularly special about this pizza, other than the fact that for $10,000, on Valentine’s Day 2012, Pizza Hut was willing to supply you with limo service, flowers, a fireworks show, a videographer, and a $10 dinner box to go along with a red ruby engagement ring.  Because, let’s be honest, if she was going to say “yes” after you spent ten grand to take her to a fucking Pizza Hut on Valentine’s Day, she won’t care if the ring has diamonds or not, she’s already too busy thinking about how she’s going to fuck the pool boy as soon as you go to work on Monday.

Of course, finally, that leads us to the most expensive pizza we’ve yet to encounter.

Yeah, for $12,000 You’d Better Make The Damn Pizza In My House

At least the website for Renato Viola’s Louis XIII Pizza is honest.  “Louis XIII:  Very Expensive Pizza.”  For those of you who clicked the link and began screaming in justified American rage at seeing a foreign language, the pizza-making process involves three chefs (the pizza-maker, sommelier, and a separate chef) bringing ingredients to your home, where they will construct a pizza containing eight different kinds of cheese, three kinds of caviar, lobster, prawns, Squilla Mantis (which is unfortunately just a Mediterranean species of shrimp, not a badass B-movie about a hip-hop part-squid-part-praying-mantis), pink Australian sea-salt, and of course champagne and cognac are involved, because why do you even care at this point?

We’re just sort of numb to all of this excess by now, so if you’ll excuse us, it’s time for us to find the cheapest, greasiest slice of pizza from a hot-plate rack at a liquor store we can find.  Now that’s quality.