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.

Rossini was based in a small town outside of Perugia, in the truffle-producing region of Umbria. Between my junior and senior years of high school, I had met Ubaldo Rossini, and we started working together. That winter I sold $233,000 worth of truffles to restaurants in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. My cash margin was almost zero because we discounted prices to move volume in my backwater market, but money mattered less to me than the truffles themselves.

“You only have one reputation.

The experience introduced me to an important idea. To get the best quality and to choose your own selection, you have to go to the point of origin. I also realized that the prices I had been paying for gems in Houston were inflated by markups charged by each tier of middlemen along the way. What was true of diamonds in Mumbai then is also true for the truffles, mushrooms, and caviar I buy today. I always want to find the first link in the supply chain because that’s where the best deals happen, and by going to the source, where the product is unadulterated, I can find the purest quality. It’s a fundamental principle of my business.

Truffles are a family of subterranean fungi, and most edible varieties belong to the genus Tuber. Mycologists describe truffles as mycorrhizal fungi from the Greek words meaning “fungus” and “roots.” Mycorrhizal fungi grow in symbiotic association with their host trees, meaning that they have a mutually beneficial relationship. The microscopic rootlets of the fungus organism, the mycorrhizae, extract minerals from the soil and share them with the tree, and the tree feeds the fungus with sugars produced in its leaves through photosynthesis

For much of the year, the truffle organism is nothing more than a network of rootlets, fine as hair, that spreads among the tree roots. Then, in response to seasonal or weather-related triggers, the truffle organism produces a fruiting body, the part we eat. There is no consensus on what prompts the fruiting bodies to form. Ancient Romans believed that truffles were materialized by lightning strikes, and modern-day Bedouin still do. The heavy rain that accompanies thunderstorms is a better explanation, although temperature and other factors probably come into play as well. The fruiting body contains spores, the fungal equivalent of seeds, and as the truffle matures after several months of growth, it releases an aroma to attract animals. The animals dig it up to eat, scattering spores to generate the next generation of truffles. Conscientious truffle hunters will scrape clean a freshly dug truffle and put the spore-rich dirt back in the hole. A lot of hunters also follow the lunar calendar, believing that the harvest peaks at the full moon.

A few days before the first shipment was due to arrive in August, Ubaldo told me over the phone that for him to break even, he would need to sell a minimum of ten kilos, twenty-two pounds of truffles. He also revealed that Tartufi Rossini had no established accounts in the U.S.—exactly zero customers ready to absorb the shipment. I freaked out. I didn’t realize until that moment that I had the sole responsibility to sell the truffles. I thought my function was only to receive shipments and break them into smaller orders for Ubaldo’s customers.

he was delighted by our first-year sales—$233,000. I