The jaw-dropping $72 crab fried rice at Lily in San Francisco is now back, with an even bigger price tag.
Chef Rob Lam has resurrected the dish at $500 a plate, but all proceeds will go to local community organizations, according to reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle.
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The rice will return to the modern Vietnamese restaurant at 225 Clement St. starting Wednesday, Aug. 25. Only 10 orders total will be available for dine-in only by reservation every week on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Lam said he wanted to leverage the interest garnered from a recent story about the dish. Calls and messages have poured in every day from people requesting the fried rice, despite his on-the-record commitment to never serve it again. Fox News called for an interview (he declined).
The exposure "started as a negative but it turned into a real positive," Lam said of the new charity mission. All in all, the team hopes to raise $4,000 every week for a rotating set of nonprofits.
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The Lily team started making the crab fried rice — a purposefully over-the-top dish with caviar, uni from Japan, A4 Miyazaki Wagyu sirloin and black truffle XO sauce — as a joke in late 2020. But it quickly became the restaurant’s best-seller in spite of the steep price, overwhelming the kitchen. Due to the high cost of ingredients, the dish also didn’t turn a profit. In June, Lam killed the #1 Dac Biet Fried Rice, which internally they called the "#1 douchebag fried rice."
Lam said he was originally put off by the number of people willing to shell out $72 for such an indulgent dish that wasn’t even representative of Lily’s food, playful but thoughtful takes on classic Vietnamese flavors. It started to feel like "San Francisco isn’t San Francisco anymore," he said.
With the fundraiser, he hopes to flip that on its head. He’s planning to announce the fried rice’s return on Instagram with the message, "not all douchebags are bad."
The first organization to receive donations via crab fried rice will be SF New Deal, a nonprofit that has provided support to small businesses and food-insecure residents during the pandemic. Future proceeds will go to the Rose Pak Memorial Scholarship, which provides college financial aid to Asian American high schoolers in San Francisco, and climate control. He plans to rotate them out every few months and wants to keep the whole thing going for at least nine months.
Lily is now accepting reservations for the dish online.
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