THE FIRST TIME I had caviar with potato chips, it was at Air’s Champagne Parlor, shortly after the Greenwich Village wine bar opened in 2017. A mere half-ounce of caviar dressed up thin potato chips dipped in crème fraîche. I’d always regarded caviar as expensive, decadent, and here I was scooping it with the housemade equivalent of Pringles. That high-low juxtaposition was intended to make caviar “approachable and not scary,” recalled Air’s proprietor, Ariel Arce. During the pandemic, Ms. Arce went on to launch a caviar company of her own, CaviAIR, aiming to bring the “cool factor to fish eggs.”

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