Tehran’s Infamous $80 Caviar Burger

As the TV Plus camera pans across the dining hall of the Grill Factory restaurant in Tehran’s wealthy suburb of Lavasan, we see photographs of cowboys in action and, strangely enough, a drawing of Che Guevara (video below, in Persian). We wait for Shervin, a young man of 22, to appear before the camera to tell the story of the $80 hamburger and its subsequent notoriety.

The restaurant only serves hamburgers, priced from around $5 up to $80. Shervin presents his most expensive hamburger as a “luxury” meal, using the English word —  something he equates to the brands of Gucci or Louis Vuitton. His restaurant appears to be very successful because, he says, “Iranians love luxury.” Perhaps they also love fame. “Become stars with us,” a commercial shown mid-way through the video suggests.

Unlike most Iranian dishes in restaurants, this $80 burger is small. Shervin makes the salty bun himself, covering it with Iranian vegetable butter. The burger is made up of clover sprouts, 12 grams of fresh Beluga caviar, four quail eggs, blue cheese and provolone, which he says he orders from Poland, and vegetarian caviar. Served with French Dijon mustard, the finished produce tastes sour, salty and spicy.

Smart Businessman or Opportunist?

The restaurant and its owner have attracted a lot of attention on social media. Some people have called Shervin “smart,” while others accuse him of being an unscrupulous “opportunist.” 

“This gentleman must first learn how to treat the customer,” someone called Peyvand complained on Instagram. “We don’t need the [American] accent that he puts on. When you enter the shop it seems as though he wants to fight you...I went there once, but because of this gentleman’s ugly manners, that was my last time. I am really sorry for him. He behaves like a buffoon by putting on an accent.”

The restauranteur says his manners are specific to him, meaning that he does not go in for Iranian-style jokes or pleasantries. He does not tolerate tardiness either: if customers do not arrive on time they lose their reservations. Not everyone has warmed to this approach, but Shervin says, “Customers might get angry, but this is not the place for it. This is my business, this is my home, and you are my guests, but you must come on time and leave on time.” (He also uses the English words for “business” and “time.”)

The now famous — even infamous — video runs 10 minutes. Those who have labeled Shervin an “opportunist” also talk about “favoritism,” insisting that only an unhealthy, abnormal market like Iran’s could have enabled a 22-year-old to sell people $80 burgers. Others have called him “smart” because “he understands that young Iranians are into boasting and luxury.” Some commenters have cast doubt not only on his American accent and his use of English words, but also on his claim of having been born in the US.

“Well, some more anonymous people with more anonymous money must be given new opportunities to spend their money,” commented Noushin Zargari, who describes herself as a young writer, on Facebook. She adds that there’s a mother is running around the alleyways of her neighborhood shouting out that her child is going hungry. “As long as you eat $80 hamburgers, more mothers are going to go mad and more children are going to go hungry and be humiliated,” she wrote. 

“May you Choke!”

Former TV producer and scriptwriter Mostafa Azizi also took the opportunity to show his distaste. The little princes “who support the most rabid and criminal kind of capitalism are defending the arrival of $80 burgers to Tehran’s Lavasan!” he posted on Facebook. “A worker’s salary is $280! But when there’s talk of increasing workers’ pay these same people say it would hurt production and that the factories are broke...Then where does the money for these $80 sandwiches come from? May you choke on these burgers and caviar, you plundering upstarts!”

People on Instagram and Twitter also compared the price of the burger with the income of workers, raised the issue of women who searched trash cans or begged in order to eat, young children who are forced to work, homeless people who sleep in empty graves, and others who sell their kidneys just to get by.

But others seemed completely unsurprised by the  price of the caviar burger. “I am an ordinary employee with an ordinary income and an occasional customer of Dirty Feri [a popular sandwich shop in Tehran],” wrote Mohsen Saatchi. “But believe me, the $80 burger that people are talking so much about and consider to be a manifestation of aristocratic and luxury-loving behavior is not that out of reach. That poor guy who has returned from America and thinks his sandwich is so high-priced has yet to taste Tehran’s $100 ice cream, has yet to ride a $2.5 million car and has yet to play poker in a Tehran underground casino with $150 chips. Otherwise he would know that there are more than a few people who can save the money for a few Dirty Feri [sandwiches] in order to taste the $80 burger.”

The $125 Ice Cream

The high price of some of Iran’s most elite restaurant regularly hits the headlines. In 2011, the price of an ice cream covered with gold powder sold at Tehran’s Milad Tower provided fodder for the media, and even semi-official news agencies like Fars covered the story. The ice cream contains two grams of gold, imported from Germany, and costs around $125.

The luxury lifestyles of rich Iranians, especially those living in Tehran, and how they compete with one another to see who can be the most  conspicuous consumer, have also been popular subjects on social networks for quite some time. There are plenty of photos on Instagram of glamorous Iranian girls at late-night parties or boys driving Maseratis, Ferraris, Porsches and Corvettes. One Instagram page, the Rich Kids of Tehran, stirred up a lot of controversy and eventually found its way into international media.“We Iranians are better than anybody,” wrote the page’s administrator when Rich Kids went online in 2014. “We set up this page to show that Iran is not all bad things and misery. I hope everybody makes money and has a great time.”

Whether Shervin is an unscrupulous “opportunist” or “smart,” one thing is certain: there’s a market for what he offers, even at such a high price. “At the restaurant, I talked to a few people who had come from America,” one person commented on TV Plus’ site. “They all said that if you want to make money, there is no place like Iran.”