Subject: Champagne and Chips To: REDACTED From: REDACTED Date: REDACTED
Forget caviar—pull open a matte black cupboard, reach for a crumpled bag of Kettle-cooked Sea Salt and Vinegar chips. The acidity rips across your palate like a scalpel, a violent contrast to the cold smoothness of the Krug sliding down your throat. Grease on your fingers. Salt on your lips. It’s vulgar. And that’s precisely the point. There’s something perversely satisfying about pairing champagne—$3,000 a bottle—with snack food made in a factory by people who probably pronounce Merlot like it rhymes with pellet. It’s confrontation. High art meets supermarket shame. Warhol would applaud. But if you’re going this route—really leaning in—make sure the setting is curated. Minimalist penthouse. Marble countertops. Brutalist ashtray. Crystal flutes... Forget flutes. People with class drink from the neck. You don’t want to normalize the chaos. You want to frame it. Like a taxidermied swan in a chrome vitrine. Better yet: Naked concrete. Raw. Brutalist. Unapologetically architectural. One big room. Top floor of an old warehouse in the industrial part of town. Somewhere no one lives, but everyone wants to be seen arriving. The kind of building that used to house machine parts and dead secrets. Brick shell, steel skeleton, freight elevator that groans like it remembers things. That kind of space doesn’t whisper—it commands. Steel beams exposed like the bones of a dead titan. Concrete polished with sandpaper to a clinical sheen, but still rough enough to remind you: this isn’t home—it’s habitat. You don’t decorate a place like that. You curate it. Every object should feel like a threat. Cold surfaces. Black leather. Something very expensive positioned dead center—maybe on, or inside, the mezzanine. Steel-railed. Elevated. Industrial construction lights—tripod-mounted, blinding, hissing slightly from overuse. They don’t just illuminate the space. They interrogate it. No warmth. No diffusion. Just raw, surgical exposure. It’s not ambience—it’s accusation. A few obscene sculptures. Cold to the touch. Distorted. Confrontational. No art unless it unsettles. And it’s never framed. It’s painted directly onto the walls. Like a warning. Or a confession. The sound in a loft like that? Unforgiving. Tricky’s “Christiansands.” Low. Slow. Sinister. You're not dancing. You're moving. Something between ritual and recoil. A shamanic trance. A controlled unraveling. Reverb that turns every step into a threat. Every breath into a monologue. You're barefoot, of course. No one wears shoes in a place like that. Maybe no pants either. Floor-to-ceiling windows facing a skyline you don’t respect. Outside: chaos. Inside: ritual. Not joy. Not freedom. Dominion. This isn’t the club. It’s not even the afterparty. This is the part no one gets invited to. And while you can’t go wrong with anything greasy + champagne... Chips are better. Pizza—while thematically appropriate in terms of grease, sleaze, and cultural contradiction—requires logistics. You need heat. Tools. Delivery. Time. Skill. There’s a process involved. And the moment you involve process, you flirt with intention. Planning. Care. That is precisely what you should be avoiding here. Chips are pure chaos in foil. Instant gratification. Prepackaged nihilism. No cutting. No plate. No crust to flop or fold. Just salt and violence straight from a crumpled bag. They’re always there. Always ready. Like a loaded, gold-plated and engraved 1911 in a drawer next to the bed. Pizza is a statement. Chips are a reflex. And only the most basic, most hostile flavors. Salt. Jalapeño. Anything that hurts a little. Nothing complex. Something that forces you to sip Krug like it’s holy water. You're not eating. You're performing high-gloss sacrilege.
P.S The whole “drink from the neck” thing isn’t just punk posturing—it’s functional rebellion. The rejection of etiquette isn’t arbitrary—it’s deliberate choice. Why it works: 1. Less bubble loss: Flutes are tall and narrow to preserve carbonation, yes—but once it’s poured, it's already losing gas. From the bottle? You keep the pressure. Every swig is tighter. More intact. More real. You're drinking from the source, not something siphoned for social comfort. 2. More concentrated flavor: A swig from the bottle is like a power chord. Direct. No air, no swirl, no sniff—just impact. Flutes moderate; the neck delivers. 3. Polite people tried to dress it up: Flutes, coupes, tulips—they’re not about taste, they’re about containment. About social control dressed up as elegance. Each one is just a different leash for something that was never meant to be tamed. Good champagne isn’t meant to behave. It’s not polite. It’s feral. It's pressure barely held in glass. Acid disguised as luxury. Every bubble is a riot waiting to happen. Trying to “civilize” it with delicate glassware is like putting a muzzle on a wolf and calling it refined. 4. It was meant this way: The monks who invented champagne didn’t drink it from flutes. It wasn’t luxury, it was alchemy. Drinking it from the bottle? That’s not vulgar. That’s the source. And please... Do not smother the neck. You're not eating it. You're drinking from it. Full lip seal = vacuum = glug-glug disaster. Leave space for airflow. Tilt. Breathe. Flow. Let the bottle tip gently. Champagne should enter you like a well-timed insult—sharp, sudden, and with full intent. You're not drawing it out with effort. You’re receiving it. With authority. One hand. Always. Two hands on a bottle looks like you’re either proposing or about to drop it. One hand says control. Casual control. The kind that knows it can drop $3,000 on a bottle and not care about the spill. Don’t overcommit the tilt. The goal isn’t volume—it’s impact. Small sip, massive statement. A restrained pour from the neck is louder than a full flute in a ballroom.