Ian Purkayastha

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.