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Ovo Boy! Satisfy your caviar jones at these not-so-cheap houses of caviar worship. If you're looking for caviar in your town, you might try searching under Russian restaurants. • Caviar Russe • Caviarteria • Firebird • Petrossian

Right now, the best quality caviar, known as malossol (which is processed with only the minimum amount of salt necessary to preserve the eggs) sells for around $20 an ounce for Sevruga, $25 for Osetra, and $40 for Beluga. While Beluga has the largest and firmest eggs, many people prefer Osetra, which has a suaver flavor. Sevruga has the most pronounced taste, although the eggs are very small and often soft, making them hard to slap and burst against the roof of your mouth -- one of the greatest pleasures of eating caviar. Other fish that produce esculent roe include the salmon, with large vermilion beads, the whitefish, lumpfish, cod, trout, shad, turbot, and whiting. All make adequate (if not nearly as savory) substitutes for true sturgeon caviar when money is tight, especially given the fact that books tell you it is polite to serve between one and two ounces of caviar per person. I'll tell you that you can get away with less if you pad the offerings with blinis or boiled little red potatoes cut in half (people spread the potato half with the caviar), a platter of smoked fish, and plenty of champagne.

Roe, roe, roe your blini ... For a crash course in fish eggs, check out our digest -- it's full of caviar info.

And that brings me to the other great pleasure of eating caviar, accompanying the glistening eggs with the only beverage suitable to New Year's Eve joy: Champagne. Now, if I ever write a best-selling cookbook and decide to serve caviar more than once a year, I might vary the beverage with the likes of iced Russian vodka. But as things stand, nothing suits my yearly treat so much an austere, bone dry, extra-brut Champagne. There is something magical about the interplay between the bursting pearly spheres of the caviar and the sparkling frothy bubbles of the wine. If Champagne is already a party in a bottle, than the combination of caviar and Champagne is a veritable gala event. And tickets are only a bottle and tin away.