Kevin West

My dad and I met Ubaldo for coffee the next morning at the Fancy Food Show. I braced for the worst, but to my delight my dad beat around the bush. He talked in a general way about how I was still in school and needed to focus on my studies.

At the height of white truffle season, which runs from October to New Year’s Day, I can sell fifty pounds a week. In volume, that’s nothing compared to the fifty pounds of potatoes a restaurant might use for a single meal service. But fifty pounds of truffles amounts to $100,000 wholesale. Even jaded chefs perk up when I walk in with a basket of truffles. I’m horrible for a restaurant’s food costs, but chefs will pay anything for my product. Nothing in the kitchen, with the possible exception of cocaine or twenty-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, makes a chef hornier.

Things like substituting worthless Chinese truffles indistinguishable in appearance from true European black truffles but lacking all flavor. Caviar treated with borax, which gives the beads extra pop but can melt your liver.