King Charles’ €500K lobster dinner blows hole in French presidency’s budget

MicroWave@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 376 points – King Charles’ €500K lobster dinner blows hole in French presidency’s budget
politico.eu

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.

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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.

Meanwhile just as good chefs that didn't get the fame break (or possibly better but their personality means they shouldn't be let out of the kitchen) are struggling to make ends meet.

same as it ever was.

Pick an industry that is also the case. In marketing There are people earning 7 figures for configuring a Google ads deck that a talented undergrad could do in half the time

In acting you can just throw a dart at the SAG directory.

Painting, music, business administration, politics. You name it.

Gordon: welcome to my fancy private dinner experience. What can I make for you?

Guest: I would like your finest grilled cheese sandwich please.

Gordon: oh fuck, oh shit!

You may have to be more specific with the definition of grilled cheese for him.

Ramsay's "ultimate" grilled cheese

What the fuck was that?? I was hoping for some chronic grilly chee but that was an abomination. I’ve seen children make better grilled cheese sandwiches.

For one...thats a melt. And it doesnt look great. But I think there in lies the rub. even the best chefs get there by experimenting and trying new things and even then, when they get outside their wheelhouse, they arent any better than that dude at your local diner.

You people make me sick.

A grilled cheese consists of only these following items. Cheese. Bread with spread (usually butter). This entire subreddit consist of "melts". Almost every "grilled cheese" sandwich i see on here has other items added to it. The fact that this subreddit is called "grilledcheese" is nothing short of utter blasphemy.

Let me start out by saying I have nothing against melts, I just hate their association with sandwiches that are not grilled cheeses. Adding cheese to your tuna sandwich? It's called a Tuna melt. Totally different. Want to add bacon and some pretentious bread crumbs with spinach? I don't know what the hell you'd call that but it's not a grilled cheese.

I would be more than willing to wager I've eaten more grilled cheeses in my 21 years than any of you had in your entire lives. I have one almost everyday and sometimes more than just one sandwich. Want to personalize your grilled cheese? Use a mix of different cheeses or use sourdough or french bread. But if you want to add some pulled pork and take a picture of it, make your own subreddit entitled "melts" because that is not a fucking grilled cheese.

I'm not a religious man nor am I anything close to a culinary expert. But as a bland white mid-western male I am honestly the most passionate person when it comes to grilled cheese and mac & cheese. All of you foodies stay the hell away from our grilled cheeses and stop associating your sandwich melts with them. Yet again, it is utter blasphemy and it rocks me to the core of my pale being.

Shit, I stopped lurking after 3 years and made this account for the sole purpose of posting this. I've seen post after post of peoples "grilled cheeses" all over reddit and it's been driving me insane. The moment I saw this subreddit this morning I finally snapped. Hell, I may even start my own subreddit just because I know this one exists now.

You god damn heretics. Respect the grilled cheese and stop changing it into whatever you like and love it for it what it is. Or make your damn melt sandwich and call it for what it is. A melt.

Honey wake up new copypasta just dropped

Definitely not a new copypasta. That's from a famous reddit post from years ago.

My favorite part is, shortly after the original post was made r/grilledcheese (the sub it was posted in) was filled with memes like this:

Lol I can hear him saying that.

Also for good measure

"for dessert I'd like, a banana freshly peeled with a small glass of grocery store orange juice."

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

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 ?

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.

for 1000 people

$500 per person would be quite cheap for this sort of thing, 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.

the national average cost of a wedding in 2023 was $35,000

Source.

The average American wedding cost $29,000 in 2023.

Source.

The average cost of a wedding is $33,000 in 2024.

Source.

I assume that these estimates are based on different datasets, and my guess is that they're biased upwards, but they do roughly match what I know from personal experience.

The issue with these statistics is that they look at the average, which is heavily boosted by the exceptionally expensive weddings of the higher upper-class. The median is significantly lower.

https://silkstemcollective.com/median-and-average-wedding-cost/

Also I'm not American, maybe people there just spend a lot more on weddings in general than what I'm used to.

You're correct, but even the median (with inflation) is still probably over $20,000 right now (based on the assumptions that it was $18,000 in 2019 and 2020 is not representative). I think my broader point still stands.

I know a person currently planning a relatively small wedding, and she's trying very hard to save money. One cost-cutting measure was booking a space on the fourth floor of a building without an elevator. (She asked me whether or not it would be possible for strong guests to carry elderly guests up the stairs.) Her budget is still $10,000.

I can go to a restaurant down the street that isn't crazy expensive and spend $150/person with alcohol easily. I've had Michelin starred dinners for $500/person with normal person nice wine. This a fancy state dinner for the fucking king with likely very expensive wine. French Laundry, one of the best restaurants in the world, is close to $1000/person with wine and that isn't for fancy $2000/bottle wine.

As far as wedding costs go, $25k is pretty normal for a wedding. My cheapest friend cheaped out hard on his wedding and spent $5000 over 25 years ago in Indiana. Getting a wedding down to $10k is hard these days. The median is now $18.5k. So if the median spend is close to $20k, then middle class people are often spending more than that.

https://www.moneygeek.com/financial-planning/analysis/average-cost-of-wedding/

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.

They were probably opening $1000/bottle Burgundy wines, too.

The article mentions 40k EUR were spent on wine, which is a modest 250 per person. Assuming 4 people to a bottle, you're right on the money.

Probably tastes the same as a 20€ bottle anyway, still a waste

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.

Force everyone who attended to pay their $3,000 a plate bill

That's a few months of food for an average person

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.

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Curious why this bot gathers downvotes - can anyone say?

Personally, it’s absolutely maddening to see this long ass reply in every thread. I know I can block it, but I choose to downvote instead. Perhaps the bot creator could shorten the reply to a single line and a link?

Just my $0.02

It's only a long reply because whatever client your using doesn't parse spoiler tags.

This is what it should look like:

Not one line, but also not especially obtrusive.

Good point. I guess several mobile clients are having issues with the spoiler tag.

I dunno. I think it adds something of value without being obtrusive.

I think it rated a news outlet as "moderately credible / left bias" causing some to feel attacked.

The usual complaint that I see people bring up is that the people behind it have a pro-Israel bias. But for a quick glance, it's fine. The issue is that on Reddit, you'd have like 5 bot replies for 1000 human replies, and on Lemmy you'll have 3 for 15 of the same, so they stand out more. In my opinion, anyway.

My complaint is kind of in this vein. I joined Lemmy to get away from this kind of bullshit. I go to comments to read what other people are saying, not to have a bot shove it's opinion in my face on literally every fucking thread. Especially if the article has 1 or 2 comments so you go to the comments to see what people are discussing just to find it's 2 fucking bots, so no discourse is actually happening.

The bullshit response of "well block it" is actually worse... Cause then you miss any responses made under it. So every time I see it, I just downvote it and move on. I do this with basically every bot I run into on here.

People question the ability for it to be objective due to it being created and run by a single person combined with being an automated process that implies it is authoritative in the context of the communities where the bot is automated.

I think MBFC is about as good as is available, kind of like Snopes. Both have a history of trying to be objective even if they aren't perfect.

Although Snopes' verdicts are far less important, being on things like urban myths.

They frequently report on conspiracies and political myths, too

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.

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