A $215 Thanksgiving dinner, before the $395 caviar

Thanksgiving at Bourbon Steak New York starts at $215 per adult. That buys the three-course meal. The caviar can cost more than dinner.

The restaurant's November 26 menu lists Petrossian Imperial Kaluga service at an additional $395. For a couple ordering two adult menus and one of those caviar services, the food alone would reach $825, before tax and gratuity. That's a calculated example, not a package the restaurant is selling.

The caviar list has two rungs, both from Petrossian of Paris. Royal Daurenki runs $225. The Imperial Kaluga at $395 is the top, priced like a second dinner. The service is traditional: egg mimosa, red onion, crème fraîche and chive. None of it is required. That is rather the point of it. The restaurant bills the night as cherished traditions reimagined through Mina's signature cuisine; the menu reads more plainly than that — turkey and truffle gravy, with a ladder of expensive ways to leave the tradition behind.

Turkey, or the upgrade list

Michael Mina's restaurant inside JW Marriott Essex House offers the familiar holiday centerpiece, roasted heritage turkey, with Grand Marnier-cranberry sauce and truffle gravy. Diners can also choose a center-cut filet mignon or a potato-crusted sole with wilted spinach and trout roe beurre blanc; the filet and the ribeye both come with a horseradish-crusted tomato and garlic herb butter. A Washugyu ribeye adds $65; three grams of black winter truffle adds $95.

The first course is a choice of five. There is a seasonal soup, and a shrimp cocktail with a gin-spiked sauce and horseradish. A hearts of palm salad comes with butter lettuce, ruby red grapefruit and avocado under a poppy seed and Dijon vinaigrette. Bacon-wrapped scallops get a foie gras emulsion, golden raisin and pistachio. The fall squash and kale chopped salad mixes acorn squash, dried cranberries and pomegranate with sunchoke chips and a ginger vinaigrette.

The sides are ordered for the table and stay close to the holiday: chestnut stuffing with sage custard and sourdough toasties, crispy Brussels sprouts in a sweet chili sauce, and a sweet potato purée finished with rye maple syrup and Ceylon cinnamon. Dessert is pumpkin either way — a pumpkin Basque cheesecake with maple-spiced whipped cream and candied cranberries, or the classic pumpkin pie with whipped cream and candied pecans.

There is a separate menu of dishes for the table, including a $130 lobster pot pie. The point isn't that Thanksgiving needs any of this. It's how far a holiday dinner can travel beyond turkey once a luxury steakhouse gives guests an upgrade list.

Run the whole ladder and the meal changes shape. The $395 caviar, the $95 truffle, the $65 ribeye supplement and all three dishes built for the table — the pot pie, a 40-ounce dry-aged porterhouse at $275 and a 4-ounce Hokkaido striploin at $98, both served with the same horseradish-crusted tomato and garlic herb butter as the filet — add $1,058 to the check before tax and gratuity, on top of the prix fixe itself.

NBC's New York Live took its cameras inside the room:

Two until 8:45

Thanksgiving service runs from 2 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. on November 26. Children 12 and under are listed at $107 for the same three courses, also before tax and gratuity. The public reservation listing does not establish that every time remains bookable. Reservations run through the restaurant's SevenRooms page and OpenTable, and the listing takes parties of up to 15. Outside the holiday, the room serves dinner nightly from 5 to 10.

The room is part of the draw. Bourbon Steak is the first Manhattan restaurant from Michael Mina, the James Beard Award-winning chef whose group runs about two dozen restaurants across the country; executive chef Bryan Ogden runs this kitchen. It sits inside the JW Marriott Essex House at 160 Central Park South, across from the park. This year, Tripadvisor's Travelers' Choice Awards named it the No. 3 fine-dining restaurant in the United States, and its wine program is run by Alex Mares, who this year became a Master Sommelier with the highest examination score in his cohort. The rest of the year, the kitchen is known for Mina's tuna tartare, miso black cod, butter-poached Maine lobster and tomahawks carved tableside. Miss Thanksgiving and the same kitchen has already posted a Christmas Day prix fixe and a New Year's Eve dinner.

For people staying home, the restaurant also advertises a separate reheat-and-serve Thanksgiving offering — a prepared feast with the traditional fixings — with pickup November 25, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; pre-orders run through the restaurant's own site. Its price was not verified in this reporting and should not be confused with the $215 dine-in menu.