This from an interesting profile of chef Gordon Ramsay in last week’s New Yorker.
That night, James Lloyd, one of Condes’s assistants, was serving the chef’s table, eight young men from a hedge-fund company, who ordered a thousand-dollar bottle of 1970 Latour (“Keep back a glass for us,” Ramsay whispered) and, midway through, were approaching the ten-thousand-dollar mark. (James kept Ramsay informed like someone reporting a sports score.) The next night, the chef’s table was reserved by Goldman Sachs: “budget not important,” I was told, possibly a fifty-thousand-dollar wine bill. (At Pétrus, a Ramsay restaurant in London, six bankers once spent sixty-three thousand dollars on dinner. Five of them were fired after they tried to expense it, a story that was reported in just about every paper in London. “It was a year before we saw another banker,” Ramsay said.)