Pearl Street Caviar Company Promises Caviar At Your Doorstep Within 90 Minutes

You can get your groceries delivered. You can get your still-sweating bottles of rosé brought straight to your doorstep. But how about your caviar? Well, now you can get that delivered, too.

On Friday, July 19, the Brooklyn-based Pearl Street Caviar, a new, sustainable caviar company, launched an on-demand weekend delivery service in the Hamptons. The delivery service, which will be available Friday to Sunday, noon to 8 p.m., through Labor Day, covers the entire area between Southampton and Montauk. Shoppers can text their orders to 917-300-9041, and caviar is delivered within 90 minutes. During the off-season, shoppers can use Pearl Street’s regular online delivery service, which offers tins of caviar beginning at $25 for 30g (with free delivery—though not within 90 minutes—in the Tri State area).

“Our primary goal is to put caviar in places where it hasn’t been before,” Lucy Pollack, Pearl Street Caviar Head of Partnerships and Marketing said. “One of the ways that we are trying to do that is by making it affordable.”

By traditional caviar standards, Pearl Street Caviar is, in fact, relatively affordable, with an entry-level delivery sampling beginning at under $200. With the pricing and delivery model, Pearl Street Caviar is setting itself up to be the next millennial fad, if (and when) it strikes a chord with Instagram influencers.

Currently, Pearl Street Caviar offers three different pricing categories for delivery. The Appetizers & Aperitifs delivery ($164 for 4 people) includes 30g Siberian Select caviar and 30g Keluga caviar, the Bottomless Brunch ($248 for 6 to 8 people) includes 125g Siberian Select caviar, and the Classic Cookout ($410 for 6 to 8 people) includes 125g Keluga caviar. All orders come with a custom tin opener, a Mother of Pearl spoon, and potato chips.

Another goal of the company has been to expand the overall access to caviar, which has long since been considered the provenance of the very elite. “We’re taking some of the pretension out of it,” Ms. Pollack said. “You don’t only have to have it on New Year’s Eve.”

She stressed that the Hamptons’ long maritime culture makes it the perfect environment for enjoying caviar.

“I grew up spending summers in the Hamptons, and knowing there’s such a culture of having to go get your food. There’s such a history of seafood, and the whaling culture and the oysters that come from the area,” she said.

Caviar has not always enjoyed a youthful audience, despite the embrace of pop cultural icons like David Chang, but Pearl Street hopes to change that once and for all. “OK, this is something that came from a prehistoric fish,” Ms. Pollack said, “It’s really delicious. How do we get the purest version of it and get people to love it?”

The first hurdle was to widen the appeal. That means sustainability, for one. Pearl Street Caviar works with an aquafarm on the Thousand Islands Lake in central Asia, where they are able to source ethically raised sturgeon with minimal impact. They have also sought to broaden their base by using a text message ordering system, recognizing that most people are on their phones most of the time these days.

Once they developed a tech-savvy ordering system, they had to implement it. A few hours? That wouldn’t cut muster.

“As soon as they order it, they want it right away,” Ms. Pollack said of her customers. And the 90-minute delivery window was born. How they slog through the holiday traffic is another matter entirely.

Eventually, Pearl Street Caviar aspires to expand to other cities, possibly employing similar text messaging services. And, of course, the ultimate goal is to change the perception of caviar from something luxurious and exclusive to something that anyone can have access to. Consider the potato chips in lieu of blini, a youthful, smart trick. Who eats blini anymore, anyway?

“I think we’re still working on changing that perception on how caviar can be integrated in people’s everyday lives, but I think people are really excited to see caviar out there,” Ms. Pollack said. “We’re excited to have people eating caviar every single day. We see it as the next smoked salmon. Why not have that experience with caviar?”

Why not, indeed?

Visit pearlstreetcaviar.com for more information.