NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – There's food to feed friends, and then there's food to impress them.

From vintage sardines to tiny pearls of hand-rolled tea, fancy food finds plenty of hungry, high-end consumers ready to pay, say manufacturers, importers and distributors at the Fancy Food Show in New York this week, where some 180,000 specialty foods were on display.

At Paramount Caviar, president Hossein Aimani said caviar sales are on the upswing. As the US economy stumbled in recent years, consumers went for domestic hackleback and paddlefish at roughly $20 an ounce retail, he said.

This year, "they're buying more expensive caviar, more elegant caviar," Aimani said. "We're seeing improvement, about ten or 15 percent higher sales over last year."

Top of the line at New York-based Paramount is Israeli caviar, at almost $100 an ounce retail.

Newly available in the United States as of this past month are tins of vintage French sardines by Mouettes d'Arvor, which can last ten years if kept in a cool, dark cellar and turned over every six months, said French exporter Olivier Blanchard.

"It's like wine," he said.

Even tea can be pricey, such as a new-to-market type made from leaves of a Korean hydrangea that releases a naturally sweet oil, said Marideth Post of The Republic of Tea, based in Novato, California. It retails for roughly $17 for 36 bags.