the talon club at The Cosmopolitan of Las vegas serves up a US$688 bowl of soup
Here we go again. After cheesecakes, chocolate and sugar cubes, there is truly no dish that can’t be spun into a version claiming to be the world’s most expensive. So here we are in Las Vegas, where swanky strip hotel The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas is no mere soup kitchen as it serves up the world’s most expensive bowl of soup.
This, however, is a pleasure reserved only for a select few. It is only available to guests of the Talon Club, a VIP private gaming room at the resort-casino, and the ingredients should clue you in instantly to the target audience of the dish. Black-skinned chicken breast, longan berries and red dates in a chicken broth, as well as, oh, about 7 grams of cordyceps. It is the latter that propels the dish to its price tag of US$688 (RM2,715) per bowl; valued for its purported properties as a natural cancer treatment and an anti-aging material, the cordyceps served at the Talon Club are specifically harvested from the Himalayan mountains.
The dish actually quietly made its debut in 2017, with about a hundred served over the year. Known, and available, only to a few, it overtakes the Buddha Jumps Over The Wall soup at Kai Mayfair in London (£108/RM578) and the Presidential Beef Noodle Soup at Niu Ba Ba in Taipei, Taiwan (TWD10,000/RM1,325) as the world’s most expensive soup. At such a price tag, this certainly isn’t a chicken soup to sooth the soul before bedtime or an ill body, but it could definitely keep the winning streak going at the poker table.
