Serendipity 3 Lands Guinness World Record for Priciest Burger (for a Cause)

Posted by Sheila Shayon on May 25, 2012 10:55 AM

Ask any New Yorker or any savvy visitor where to find the best frozen hot chocolate in Manhattan and they’ll tell you Serendipity 3 on the tony Upper East Side.

Also famous for serving hamburgers since 1954 to Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, Andy Warhol, as well as more contemporary celebs including everyone from President Bill Clinton and Sarah Palin to Madonna and Justin Bieber, Serendipity 3 today announced a new Guinness World Record: its $295.00 hamburger (limited edition with 48-hour notice) is now the world's priciest. What, pray tell, merits a $300 burger, besides the solid gold toothpick that accompanies it?

Honoring National Hamburger Month, and dubbed Le Burger Extravagant, it’s a culinary extravaganza — check it out below — combining Japanese Waygu beef infused with 10-herb white truffle butter. But wait, there's more!

Le Burger Extravagant is seasoned with Salish Alderwood smoked Pacific sea salt, topped with cheddar cheese (hand-formed by the famous cheesemaker James Montgomery in Somerset, England, and cave-aged for 18 months), shaved black truffles, a fried quail egg and served on a white truffle-buttered Campagna Roll, which is topped with a blini, creme fraiche, and Paramout Caviar's exclusive Kaluga caviar — a golden caviar with a buttery, nutty taste and large pearls from the Huso Dauricus farm-raised in Quzhou, China.

And then there's that finishing touch: a solid gold "Fleur de Lis" toothpick encrusted with diamonds and designed by New York's haute Euphoria jeweler.

Calvin Holt, Stephen Bruce, and Patch Carradine conjured the fabled restaurant’s name from eighteenth century wordsmith Sir Horace Walpole’s evocation of the ancient legend of three princes of an island no longer known as Serendip. “Before he was anyone, Andy Warhol declared it his favorite sweet shop, and paid his chits in drawings. Photographers discovered the charms of Tiffany glass set against whitewashed walls. New York’s avant-garde caught on that nineteenth century junk was suddenly twentieth century chic” and the rest, as they say, is history.

But perhaps the best news is that the profits of this record-breaking burger will be donated entirely to some folks who can't afford to indulge in even one bite of it: the Bowery Mission, serving homeless and hungry New Yorkers since 1879.

And for everyone else who can't make it to Manhattan, Serendipity's fare can be ordered online or on Amazon.

Below, the Guinness-honored Le Burger Extravagant —