A €37,500 cocktail to leave even a king shaken and stirred

Throwing €37,500 at a cocktail is the kind of behaviour that got Rakewell into trouble in the first place. Let’s be clear, though: if your roving correspondent had spent that much on his tipple of choice, he’d expect the glass itself to be thrown in with it. That was not the case at Nahaté, a restaurant and bar in Dubai, where the world’s most expensive cocktail sold this week at an event to celebrate Baccarat’s 260th anniversary. Kina Lillet from 1950, vintage Patrón tequila – ‘from a barrel not available to the public and only for purchase at NAHATE’ – and 1930s Angostura Bitters were shaken by maestro bartender Salvatore Calabrese and served up in a pair of Baccarat crystal glasses dating to 1937.

Made for the International Exhibition in Paris that year, the glasses were part of the Service Leczinska, named after Marie Leszczyńska, wife of Louis XV (who gave the Baccarat Manufacture its royal warrant in 1764 – making this 260th celebration a little late?). Seeking to found a glassworks near the town of Baccarat, north-east France, Monseigneur de Montmorency-Laval, bishop of Metz, wrote a letter to the king of which Trump would be proud: ‘France lacks artistic glassware, which is why the products from Bohemia enter in such great quantity: from which follows an astonishing export of deniers, at a time when the kingdom would need them so badly.’

With a penchant for hot chocolate, Louis XV would have been no stranger to quaffing a drink worth at least as much as the vessel it was served in (his personal recipe survives – ‘Place an equal number of bars of chocolate and cups of water in a cafetière and boil on a low heat…’) – but even he might have raised an eyebrow at the price of this snifter.