GIVES LESS-EXPENSIVE CAVIAR

“so many people in new york have these hyperevolved aesthetics, so our first rule is that you don’t give anything that’s not perishable; it’s why we frequently give food. About ten years ago, our friend shared her caviar source by giving my partner a gift to Kelley’s Katch Caviar in Tennessee, which sells farm-raised paddlefish caviar meant more for cooking (from $43). It has the same consistency and grain size as sturgeon caviar, and it’s delicious. So now we send it to people yearly. You give this to people you’re intimate enough with that you know their schedule because Kelley’s delivers within a time frame in a refrigerated box. It’s never good to give less than five ounces, because then it’s nothing. The idea is you get this luxurious thing, and you get to slather it on everything, and it’s delicious.

For maybe 30 years, my partner and I have given each other pieces of late-18th- and early-19th-century china. There’s one design called ‘Lag and Leaf,’ which Bill Blass had and I always admired. But our favorite are these plates that are red oxide and blue and white with Chinese mythological creatures.

They’re beautiful. Once, at Bardith—a shop that used to be on Madison Avenue—we spotted a soup tureen and two sauce boats that had that red-oxide color and similar motifs from a slightly earlier Regency era. I thought it would be great to have these, because you never want your set to match exactly. So I went back to Steve Wolf, the proprietor, and asked to buy them. He said they’d sold, and I said, ‘In just one day?’ On Christmas Day, I opened them. Alan had beat me to it.”