It has been a dream, for years, to slap my name on a great tin of caviar. Well, I’m selling outstanding products now, as you know…including some of the world’s most food-loving Champagne…so why not endeavor to find its caviar soul-mate?
I endeavored. I found.
Let me ‘splain.
I think of every product I offer as a kind of revolution in itself…the product representing a new, better way of doing things in its world.
Here’s the existing problem with caviar: it’s all about trust. And the consumer’s not always in the best position to offer trust.
If you buy, say, Beluga caviar from some producer or other…you’re getting ripped off! Beluga caviar is illegal in the U.S. right now. That’s problem #1: the producer’s lying!
Next problem: the provenance of what you’re actually getting! If some producer tells me I’m getting Osetra, it may well be Osetra…but the producer may fail to tell me that it’s not Osetra from the Caspian Sea, but Osetra from, say, a new experimental farm in Israel. I know a famous caviar restaurant in New York City, Caviar Russe, that continually tries to obfuscate the source of its caviar. Now, what they offer may be good…but don’t you have a right, at these prices, to make an intelligent decision about your choice?
Lastly, even if you know EXACTLY what you’re getting…is it a great example?
One of the dirty little secrets of the caviar world is that sturgeon suppliers harvest many fish simultaneously, then pack the eggs of each fish into discrete tins, usually two kilos worth. So if an Italian Osetra producer is ready to ship its Osetra to a big distributor in the U.S., that U.S. distributor may receive twenty different tins of caviar, each tin packed with eggs from one fish only. The distributor in the U.S. needs to open those large tins and re-pack the caviar in smaller tins…but, along the way, the distributor is sampling the contents of each tin, determining which are the best tins. Because, believe it or not…twenty tins of caviar from the same source, and the same kind of fish…will taste completely like twenty different caviars!
These tins are all from the same producer, each tin with the eggs of one fish only…but every tin with the same kind of fish.
And now comes the Rosengarten plan. I have developed, over the last decade, a beautiful relationship with the Petrossians, the Armenian family who revolutionized caviar when they moved to Paris in the 1920s. Today, they are world leaders in quality…not to mention their uncontested leadership in developing new, non-Caspian Sea sources for great caviar (a necessity in today’s world).
I’m not sure why the caviar gods have smiled on me so benignly…but I now have an arrangement with Petrossian to sell Petrossian Caviar, A David Rosengarten Selection.
And here’s how it works.
Just before caviar-selling season (say, the holidays)…I don my lab coat, hair net, etc., walk into the inner sanctum of Petrossian World…and confront 20, or 30, or 40 two-kilo tins of caviar for tasting and analysis.
I did it just last month, as a kind of dry run. I was tasting with Alexandre Petrossian, the scion of the family, who lives in New York. We went through twenty tins (tough work!), all of them from the Sacramento Delta farm in California most famous for raising one of the great non-Caspian contenders, Transmontanus, or White Sturgeon. That’s exactly what we had, here, the yield of twenty different White Sturgeons. And we both decided that tin#7 was incontestably the best: the right amount of salt, the deepest, most complex flavors, the most obvious lack of flaws (like bitterness), the sexiest, velvetiest texture, the most right-on heir to Caspian glory.
Alex directed the bulk of this winning tin into his general marketing…but secured for me 12 two-ounce tins of it. Each tin has the glorious Petrossian iconography on it…as well as a sticker, saying “A David Rosengarten Selection.”
I’m showing these tins to friends right now as part of the dry run. But I will be back with Alex in July, tasting the caviars that both he and I will sell for the 2013 holiday season.
The implications are enormous: I will be your taster! I will be as close as you ever get to going into a caviar tasting and selecting EXACTLY what you like. To my knowledge, no one else is doing this, tin-by-tin…not even the big-name chefs who offer you “their” caviar! If you like my taste in caviar…you’re in! Trust ME…and the trust issue in buying caviar will finally be resolved!
To see a video of me tasting Petrossian caviar with Alexandre Petrossian, click here.
