King Charles’ €500K lobster dinner blows hole in French presidency’s budget
King Charles’ €500K lobster dinner blows hole in French presidency’s budget
A state dinner with the U.K.’s king cost the French nearly €500,000.
A decadent dinner costing nearly €475,000 for the U.K.’s King Charles III helped push France’s Élysée Palace — the office of President Emmanuel Macron —to a record high deficit last year.
France’s love for grand gestures and opulent dining are fully in evidence in the pages of a damning yearly audit of the Élysée’s budget, released on Monday by the Cour des Comptes, France’s top audit court.
The Élysée’s spending, which includes costs related to the president’s diplomatic and presidential duties as well as administration, personnel, security and estate management, reached a whopping €125 million, plunging the books €8.3 million into the red.
Among the biggest deficit drivers were two luxurious state dinners, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and King Charles III.
A few hundred years ago they chopped heads off of kings and queens for spending too much on everything, and now they do it for them
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
(The more things change, the more they stay the same)
I'm all for eating a nice dinner. But how do you get to a dinner bill that size?
Famous chefs who have more people requesting them than they have time in the day, so they go to whoever pays the most.
Like, Gordon Ramsey still does private events, but only if they pay more than he could be making with his TV deals.
Perfection costs a whole lot more than really, really good because costs go up exponentially.
You need multiple times the staff on hand to cook and server everything at the same time, and they should be highly paid professionals. You need to be able to discard the majority of your food supplies, which already cost a lot more than normal, to have the perfect version of every dish. The setting probably costs a lot to set up and clean up after, and attention to detail costs time and money.
It is a huge waste, but that is why it costs so much.
Everyone also has to pass a bunch of security and background checks, which costs money as well. And i am sure the supply chains for staye dinners are more expensive for the same reason
Good explanation. Still having a hard time on seeing that much, but good explanation
We are talking about taste, all "perfection" is made up there.
Mark up everything by 500%
Do you mean 500x? Because that looks like 500x.
Well, la de da with your fancy regular €100K dinners.
Step one is probably hosting it at the Palace of Versailles
Hand fished, gold coated lobster: $1,000 Cooking the lobster: $474,000
Why didn’t the king foot the bill he’s the king and he’s rich.
Let the heads roll.
Kings aint get rich by paying for shit.
He's not the king of France.
I guess this solves part of the mystery about why the French rioted when they raised the retirement age last year
This breaks down into a nightmare in my mind.
What are the components of a meal and the service attached to it that can be stretched to the maximum for someone who "has everything".
Honestly, expensive produce doesn't generate this sort of expense.
Must the catering staff all hold MBA's? Each fork is hundreds of years old and polished to a mirror finish?
The carpet and underlay, is freshly laid for the meal; and then immediately ripped up and destroyed afterwards.
I doubt Charles passed along the edict that he requires an outrageously ostentatious meal, but the French "just knew" that was the right thing to do.
I want to believe heads of state would be content eating the same meals that are served in the Olympic village.
This is the worst form of consumerism, you just point to your nose and people scramble to pamper you with praise, favour and treats.
What a truly wonderful way to outsource waste, without feeling any personal responsibility towards the consequences of your lifestyle.
And that's to please a king, so it's not like a political favor. Macron is getting nothing out of this.
I don't think it works that way.. on paper it sure looks the way you said but I'm 99% sure there's all sorts of gentlemen agreements and other back channel stuff going on there.
Maybe they got a fleet of helicopters to transport each lobster from Maine directly to France so that it'd be as fresh as possible?
Peasants have been complaining about royal feasts throughout history. You're just one scrap going through a long line of machines that chew you up, squeeze taxes out of you, and spit you out the other end to dig another hole.
Why would you waste all that money on a king who is a figurehead at best ?
Because it's big club and we ain't in it
I think it was a 100 person dinner full of french and english celebrities, including macron, and the king.
Then the rich act shocked and appalled when people talk about a violent uprising.
France should’ve elected a left wing majority. Now you’re stuck with Macron’s classist attitude.
A Frenchman wining and dining an English monarch. What has the world come to.
What. How do you even spend that much on a dinner, even for 1000 people.
And like. It's King Charles. I loved the Queen and thought she was iconic, and even I don't really care about Charles. All of my friends in my circle actively despise him and what he represents. Literally why are you trying to curry favour with him that hard.
$500 per person wouldn't be that much, given that a middle-class wedding often costs around $250 per person. (I'm guessing each guest at this dinner drank well over $500 of wine alone.)
I have no clue how you define "middle-class" but not even the fanciest weddings I've been to have spent even close to $250 per person. That kind of expenditure sounds quite a lot more like upper-class to me. Assuming you invite 100 people to the wedding, an average Joe will not have 25k to spend on one party.
You were the Chosen One! You were supposed to guillotine the monarchs, not dine with them!
With half a million dinner
Should of got maccas, it would only cost $250,000.
Came for the maccas comment
Trump actually did that when he had the winners of the Superbowl to the white house for dinner.
Can we just eat the rich already? I think I've worked up an appetite for it.
This works out to 2500 euros per person, which is expensive but not that bad in context. It's easily possible to drop hundreds at a restaurant in my medium-sized city, and an event like this is obviously at a whole other level.
Well they seem to have saved a lot by not providing reasonable quarters for the Olympic village so it probably works out in the end.
Let him eat cake next time!
Another reason why the monarchy should not exist
Force everyone who attended to pay their $3,000 a plate bill
That's a few months of food for an average person
I could make so much cassoulet with $3000
Imagine you get a dish worth probably tens of thousands alone and you don't like it.
Those damn French. They just love the aristocracy.
I have a hard time being put out for the office of the president having deficits to the tune of 1 million euros if it threw 2 fancy dinners. It's ostentatious, sure, but not crazy for heads of state and a hundred or more high powered guests in a palace. As an American, I guess I was expecting to see one more zero on the figure.
Sounds typically french to me.
I'd have to know where the money ended up.
Missed the "K" in the title and thought for a minute "well, I don't know, that sounds reasonable..."
I'm going back to sleep now.
It was for a 1000 people, so $500/head.
Its probably actually reasonable for this type of affair.
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Leave it to King Charles to be a cunt and spend the equivalent of half a million dollars on a dinner for himself.