Persephone's $100 sandwich

The other day I posted about the Butcher Shop's $16 onion soup. It seemed like a lot to pay for a little bowl of soup.

Then, Thrillist alerted me to the existence of Persephone's $100 sandwich.

It's billed on the menu as the "millionaire's sandwich": jamon iberico de bellota, sherried onions, manchego, and membrillo with mustard on ciabatta, served with an arugula, green olive, and marcona almond salad.

No, it doesn't come with fries.

My first question to host and server E.K. Greene was: Is it a joke? No, he says. "It's just a really good sandwich. The ham that it's made out of is phenomenal."

That is true. Jamon iberico de bellota is outrageously delicious, made from acorn-fed, free-ranging pigs in Spain. It's also outrageously expensive: It retails for $100 a pound and up.

But it's not like corned beef. It's rich, meaty and faintly fruity in flavor, enhanced by the thinnest slicing, which is done by hand. You want to eat it slowly, savoring each bite, in the simplest way possible: on its own with a little bowl of salted almonds and a glass of sherry, possibly on a piece of crusty baguette with butter, but nothing more complex than that. To pile it up on a sandwich like any cold cut, with all those other ingredients, sort of defeats the purpose. (And for $100, it had better be piled up.)

It is possible to look at the millionaire sandwich as a bargain, though -- when you order it, you get 5 percent off at Achilles, the boutique Persephone shares its space with. If you plan to buy enough hipster threads, it could pay for itself.

But I'm guessing that to most people, it looks like bad taste. Times are tough? Here's a $100 sandwich!