5 Gourmet Grocery Splurges for a Restaurant-Quality Meal at Home

One of the best reveals in all of cuisine is that almost anyone can recreate a fancy restaurant experience at home. A little confidence, a couple of candles, and the right grocery list go a long way toward approximating fine dining in your own space. Calibrated expectations also better position that culinary cosplay for success.

A combination of talent, training, and superior equipment is what makes those actual gourmet restaurant meals so special. The professional chefs in possession of these innate, learned, and purchased advantages will always be able to perform to a higher degree than even the most ambitious novice. That is actually liberating. When making things a little nicer for nights in, you can simply source the finer things without having to create them all from scratch. And, when you are aiming to replicate a particular menu recipe, the right buy will also be a good investment toward achievement. For a fancy restaurant meal from the comfort of your own home, consider snagging these five gourmet foods at the store.

Few snacks dazzle dinner guests as much as a tin of caviar on ice. And, being that it’s best to skip the caviar at restaurants due to its markup, cozy evenings at home or larger fêtes are tops for dipping into fish eggs. Look for sturgeon-harvested caviar (anything else is just roe; it’s a Champagne region kind of situation) and serve it with traditional accouterments like blinis and crème fraîche. Caviar is also great with kettle cooked potato chips. Get the good ones.

Cheese and charcuterie boards, as well as the “charcuterie” riffs like tinned fish compositions that eschew any actual meat, are easy to scale up for full meals, especially if you’re hosting a large group. And, because each of their assembled items is intended for solo enjoyment as well as mixing and matching, quality is key. While you might be able to skimp on something like Parmesan for grating over pasta or capicola for layering into sandwiches, it’s best to splurge on items that need to stand out on their own while still being part of a board.

Smooth, buttery foie gras is so rich that even the most prosperous among us should probably keep consumption of it to a minimum. And that’s part of what makes it such an obvious special occasion treat. Foie gras’ presentation also could not be any easier, either plated with an excellent fresh baguette and a knife, or even served right from the container it’s sold in. Crushed nuts like pistachios bring a bit of crunch, and a not-too-sweet cherry compote dresses it all up even more.

If you’re typically more conservative with your steak shopping for simple weeknight dinners, date night at home is an excellent occasion to spend a little extra. Like harder to find chateaubriand, similarly superb filet mignon is among the most famous of fancy steak cuts. It is also among the easiest to prepare, thanks in part to its forgiving thickness — an esteemed quality in a steak. A simple seasoning, a butter baste, and a proper meat thermometer are all a filet mignon needs for you to share a perfect, medium rare, carnivorous victory with your partner.

Sure, you could spend more for the best pint of ice cream in the freezer section or the finest chocolate on the shelf, but you probably already enjoy variations on those sweets with some regularity. Macarons are a little less expected for an end-of-meal treat. They also aren’t cheap, and grocery stores seem to mark up even modestly populated packages so high that each cookie can cost as much as a whole army of Keebler Elves. But macarons’ darling, whimsical departure from the ordinary is exactly the kind of buy that turns an evening at home into more of a gourmet ordeal.