Galleries owned by Larry Gagosian, the powerful and well-connected dealer who has spent his career goosing the prices of contemporary art higher and higher: 14.

Restaurants owned by the chef Masayoshi Takayama, who has spent his career charging more for Japanese food than anyone else in the United States: five.

Restaurants the two men own together: one, Kappo Masa, in the basement below Mr. Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery. The dining room, furnished with teak tables and seating upholstered in buttercup-yellow leather, wraps in an L shape around the large, well-populated kitchen. Mr. Takayama is known for sushi, but Kappo Masa presents a general overview of Japanese cuisine, so in addition to the raw-fish counter, there are stations for grilling, frying, simmering, steaming and assembling marinated seafood plates and cold salads. He runs the kitchen himself, but I failed to spot him.

Now three months old, Kappo Masa is not the most expensive restaurant in New York. That distinction belongs to Mr. Takayama’s home base, Masa, in the Time Warner Center. (Price of dinner for one before tax, tip and drinks: $450.) Still, it is expensive in a way that’s hard to forget either during or after the meal. The cost of eating at Kappo Masa is so brutally, illogically, relentlessly high, and so out of proportion to any pleasure you may get, that large numbers start to seem like uninvited and poorly behaved guests at the table.