Demos

Caviar on Doritos? TikTok loves it. Chefs, not so much

Caviar - something we might imagine belonging to the crystal-and-silver-laden dinner tables of oligarchs or the cocktail parties of one-percenters - is suddenly popping up far from those rarefied spaces.

Bars are garnishing drinks with it. People are doing caviar bumps, licking the orbs off the backs of their hands like college kids downing salt before tequila shots.

On TikTok, 20-somethings in sweatshirts are devouring it at their kitchen counters.

And in one of the most unlikely juxtapositions, they're dolloping it on Doritos, the junk food famous for leaving a tell-tale dusting of neon-orange powder on a binger's fingers.

The culinary mash-up of high and lowbrow might be familiar, and caviar-on-everything isn't even new, but this particular trend can be traced to Danielle Zaslavsky, a TikTok influencer who has become known as the platform's "caviar queen". (It helps that her family runs the retailer Marky's Caviar.)

Last month, she posted a video trying out the snack, which she credited to her brother, piling Kaluga imperial gold atop a chip and declaring it "the effing bomb".

The video has been viewed more than 1.3 million times and prompted plenty of others to follow suit, many crediting Zaslavsky for the inspiration.

The proliferation and democratisation of caviar probably has a few roots: A currently fashionable aesthetic is one of attainable decadence after a couple of years of deprivation.

And there's the fact that farm-raised caviar has given the category more affordable options, although the good stuff (think osetra and beluga) can still be eye-bogglingly pricey.