Even for someone like me, whose cigars cost more than a decent bottle of wine, those prices are insane. One hundred per person is fine. Maybe double that if I really go wild and stuff myself -- but probably I would consider that overkill already unless I was drinking heavily.
As you say, good beef is $30-40 max per kg*. So with a decent bottle of red and a few glasses of cognac that would be $150 for me at most. Anything more and I might as well cosign for the owner's third Lambo, and cut out the middle man.
*Don't get me started on Kobe or Wagyu beef. Highly overrated.
Yeah, like most things I get a sense of a diminishing increase in excellence and a sharply rising price past a certain level of quality. I doubt I'd appreciate the difference between $400 and $1000 cuisine. Ingredients and kitchen staff only get so good. Past that you're paying their location rent and I can buy a lot of petrol for $600. Tbh, I'm hard pressed to name an expensive meal that I enjoyed more than the $20 mexican chicken mole or pulled pork bbq I had on a trip to Chapel Hill, NC. (Alain Fabregue's was worth it but it wasn't $500 a head.) An occasional VSOP and my old box of Monte 2s suit me just fine if I feel like an indulgence.
*The Wagyu I was served on someone else's dollar wasn't the best beef I've ever had by a long shot. That was the prime rib at Volcano, Hawaii, in a stark cafeteria with plastic tables, believe it or not. I don't know what they did to that poor cow in the way of hormones and force feeding but it was out of this world.
