Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  Ottolenghi specializes in the small run, the vaguely regulated, the hard to come by, and the about to be banned. He carries Utah clay, fresh Pennsylvania hops, and squid ink from Spain. One of his newest products, which he has yet to place, is kopi luwak—coffee beans gathered from civet droppings. The beans, which have an exquisite burnt caramel flavor, are extremely rare and can cost as much as $1,000 a pound. “I have some of the turds,” he told me, which makes presentations lively. He often says that he is on a first-name basis with three hundred and seventy chefs in Vegas—the executive chefs and sous-chefs and chefs de cuisine at Jean Georges Steakhouse, Le Cirque, Daniel Boulud, barMASA, and dozens more—by which he may mean that he has forgotten their last names, or, if they are French, is unsure how to pronounce them. To the chefs, he is “the truffle kid”—for his first product, which he started selling online when he was thirteen—or Hamleg, owing to his tendency to walk through casino lobbies carrying the hairy, hoof-on hindquarters of a pig.

  Because of its primary identity, as a place to gamble, Las Vegas attracts some of the broadest eaters in the world: high-rolling Asian whales. There are some who say that if the casinos were to stop serving shark-fin soup in the high-limit rooms—where it goes for $100 to $300 a bowl—the city’s economy would collapse. But shark fin, a slippery, flavorless textural delight that is the pièce de résistance of formal Chinese banquets, is condemned by many as cruel and unsustainable. Sharks, whose numbers, including that of the “soupfin,” have diminished severely, are often de-finned live and then dumped back in the ocean to bleed out, get eaten, or drown. California outlawed shark fin in 2013, and there are efforts under way to ban it in Vegas. This is the kind of crisis that Ottolenghi calls an opportunity.

  Among the many impostors in the food business, he hunts for authenticity. Don’t get him started on what passes, in most people’s minds, for cinnamon: the great majority of it is mislabeled cassia. He gets the real thing from its only source, Sri Lanka. But when it comes to shark fin, inauthenticity is exactly what he’s looking for. He has found a company in China that takes tilapia tails—tail, like fin, is cartilage—and makes a faux shark-fin product that is identical in taste, texture, and appearance. There is just one obstacle: the customer. The whales, he says, want the real thing because it’s rare. His next idea is to use sturgeon tails, which might prove desirable due to their prestigious association with caviar.

  Ottolenghi prides himself on the fulfillment of outrageous and obscure demands. He has sourced pink pine nuts for Alessandro Stratta, the chef at Alex and at Stratta, two fine-dining restaurants in Las Vegas. “Just put them in my mailbox,” I heard him say to a tortilla-and-chili dealer who had located some in New Mexico. One Chinese New Year, he furnished the buffet at the Bellagio with four hundred pounds of fatted duck breast on less than twenty-four hours’ notice. After the authorities forced Guy Savoy, a two-Michelin-star restaurant at Caesars Palace, to remove a popular guinea-hen-in-pig-bladder dish from its menu—the bladder was coming from a non-USDA-approved source—the restaurant turned to Ottolenghi. “They still get tons of requests for it, so they gave me the mission of trying to get domestic pig bladders,” he says. He called pig farms and slaughterhouses in four states. “I really exhausted every possibility. There’s no way to get a pig bladder in this country—they’re all ground up for dog food.”

  • • •

  Several years ago, Ludo Lefebvre, the dashing, volatile French chef who invented the pop-up restaurant and became a television star, was cooking at a restaurant in Las Vegas. He asked Ottolenghi for piment d’Espelette, a subtle chili pepper. Piment d’Espelette is rare; the zone de l’appellation, in southwestern France, is only a few thousand acres. In powder form, the pepper can wholesale for $110 a pound. (Paprika is less than $8.) After initially working through an importer, Ottolenghi had decided to become one himself, making him, by his count, the third importer of piment d’Espelette to the United States.

  That is how he came to spend a drizzly afternoon in the spring of 2010 in the tiny Basque town of Ainhoa, quizzing a young farmer named Claire about her production methods. Claire, who had rosy cheeks and a rippled Gallic nose dotted with moles, explained that they used only pesticide biologique, good bugs to eat bad ones. Chickens pecked among white plaster buildings with red tile roofs and peeling black shutters: Ainhoa’s single architectural gesture. Claire invited us into one of the buildings and prepared a pepper tasting. As she swirled the powder in a little stemmed glass, causing it to clink—“Can you hear? It’s very dry,” she said—she explained the properties she controlled for. The color should be a rich, oxygenated red, and the flavor, ideally, is a balance of fruitiness, toastiness, and foin, an aftertaste of hay. A Basque passenger of Columbus’s, Claire said, had brought the pepper back from the New World.

  The next day, Ottolenghi had a lunch appointment in La Alberca, six hundred kilometers away, at the headquarters of Fermín, the only Spanish producer of Ibérico ham approved by the USDA for sale in the United States. Ottolenghi was the exclusive source for Fermín products in Las Vegas. He woke at eight o’clock, checked the map, and set out optimistically. I had already been traveling with him for a few days and was afraid—of his navigation and of my endurance. Food people either stuff you or starve you. Ottolenghi, an ascetic, is a starver. At home, he often consumes little more than a kefir-and-raw-egg shake in a day. On the first night of our trip, we had stayed in San Sebastián, the Michelin three-star capital of the world, and I found myself alone at dinnertime, eating a grim vegetarian patty in the hotel dining room. Driving to La Alberca, we passed dozens of small towns and scores of restaurants without stopping to eat. I devoured bags of filling-station peanuts and, by the fistful, a loaf of soft gingerbread I had picked up in Ainhoa the night before.

  In the late afternoon, we turned off the highway and onto a small road that hugged a mossy stone wall decked with wild red poppies and fried-egg flowers. On the other side was an oak forest. Young bulls bound for the ring relaxed in the shade. It was past four when we arrived in La Alberca, a pork-centric place where the hanging limbs and loins of cured Ibérico pigs serve as decoration for the tapas bars, and outside the church there is a statue of a boar, like a local saint. Just past town, we found the Fermín plant, an elegant structure built in the mid-eighties whose style referred to the area’s medieval history: fieldstone facing, held in place by a loose lattice of half-timbers. Raúl Martín, a grand-nephew of the founder, led us down to a basement dining hall with tiled floors and an open fireplace, where Luis, a jug-eared cook with a double chin, was grilling cuts of pig meat: tenderloin, pancetta, ribs, pluma (“feather,” or loin tip), presa (collar), and secreto, a cut hidden away between the ribs and the fat. Rich smoke filled the air.

  Ibérico meat is unctuous—up to 35 percent fat—and its most luxurious variety, bellota (acorn), melts at room temperature. Bellota pigs, which are released into the forest in the fall to hunt for acorns, are so oily that they are known as “olive trees with legs.” Last year, Fermín slaughtered only five thousand bellota pigs, for a total of ten thousand hams, ten thousand shoulders. The hams cure for three years; the shoulders, which are bonier, take at least two. Retail shops charge $130 a pound for the ham. Bellota is what sells in Las Vegas.

  Martín showed the way to a long wooden table piled with breadbaskets and wine and trays of chorizo and salsichon. Javier, a Fermín employee, joined us, and everyone started to gossip about ham, as Luis brought over platter after platter of cooked meat and Ottolenghi stood at an iron jamonera, cutting thin slices of bellota for the group.

  “We sent today a bellota to the royal palace, for the heads of state of Europe,” Javier said. Ottolenghi nodded, and told an equivalent story of Las Vegas aristocracy. Had the Spaniards heard of Cirque du Soleil? Yes, Martín said. “Every Christmas, Guy Laliberté, who started it, buys three bellota legs from Robuchon’s L’Atelier,” Ottolenghi reported. Then Martín held up a vacuum-packed
shank. “This is one of José Andrés’s ideas,” he said. (The chef is an importer for Fermín.) “It’s ‘corderico’—Ibérico-style lamb, fed on acorns and dried. This is the only one in the world.”

  Early the following morning, we watched the pigs get cleaned, stunned, cut, and hung on hooks from tracks that traced loops on the ceiling. Large men chiseled at them as if they were blocks of stone from which something more aesthetically pleasing could be coaxed. Then Martín showed us the room where the hams were cured—he called it “the bank”—and the breeding farm, so that we could see the Ibéricos alive. They had thick black hides, like toy rhinos, and brayed mournfully as they rutted and fought. A farmworker handed Ottolenghi several acorns of the variety that the bellota gorge on in the forest. Seeing an opportunity to impress his chefs with the depth of his knowledge, he pocketed them. Leaving Fermín, Ottolenghi asked me if I’d ever read The Jungle. “It’s my favorite book,” he said. “It’s all about how efficient the meat business is at using every part.”

  • • •

  Ottolenghi, a Millennial-generation foodie who grew up watching exotic-food shows on TV, comes from mushroom people. His parents, Arturo and Hannah, seed the logs in their backyard in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with shiitakes; morels and chanterelles grow wild. Once, when the family was living in Ohio, before Brett was born and when his brother, Alex, was an infant, Arturo spotted a hardwood forest out the car window. Suspecting that it could be harboring chanterelles, he pulled over and found two solid acres of them. As Arturo tells it, “I picked a few, took them home, and called Chanterelle, in New York, and asked for the owner. I said, ‘I know this sounds crazy, but I’m in Ohio and I have some fresh chanterelles—do you want five to ten pounds?’ She said, ‘Whatever you can ship. Anything I don’t use, my friends at Dean & DeLuca will use.’ Hannah and I parked Alex in a cradle with a mosquito net over it and packed up as many boxes as we could, took them to the airport, and that same evening all over lower Manhattan people were eating our chanterelles.”

  On a family trip to San Francisco, when Brett was twelve, he ordered a pasta dish with truffle oil on it. This led to a conversation about the high price of truffles in the United States. At the time, there was only one major importer, Urbani, an old Italian company that still dominates the market. Brett decided to see if he could compete. He was already something of an entrepreneur. In second grade, he sold Pixy Stix and gourmet lollipops at school, in violation of campus rules, and was sent to the principal’s office. In seventh, he started importing laser pens from China for eleven dollars and selling them for twenty, and wound up in the principal’s office again.

  Brett and Arturo started the Truffle Market, an online venture selling truffles that they imported from Italy, in 1998. When Newsweek mentioned that their company was selling white truffles for $60 an ounce, compared with Dean & DeLuca’s price of $106 for the same amount, business increased tenfold. “I was making thirty percent on it and I thought it was great,” Brett says now. “I didn’t even know that was a small profit.” With perishable products, you have to make a killing; at some point you will inevitably lose a shipment to spoilage or to overeager Customs officials. Brett remembers that Fareed Zakaria placed an order, as did the actor Heath Ledger. Robert Mondavi, the winemaker, began to use the Ottolenghi mushrooms for his truffle parties. But the Ottolenghis’ best customer was a young woman in Palm Beach, referred by the manager of the Palm Beach Country Club, who ordered a pound of white truffles a week for the entire season, September through December. She hated truffles, but a business associate of her father’s, an oil executive from Houston, liked to fly to Palm Beach for the weekends, and he expected to have a plate of them waiting on his bedside table. He ate them like apples.

  In the food business, Brett found youth to be an inconvenience. Rather than present the Truffle Market as a father-son venture, as Arturo had hoped, Brett insisted that his father pose alone for the picture in their first catalog. “To buy a truffle from a guy named Arturo Ottolenghi, that makes sense,” Brett says. “Not from Brett, who’s thirteen.” For a while, he styled himself “J. Brett Ottolenghi” on his business cards. When he expanded the Truffle Market and renamed it Artisanal Foods, in 2008, he used an unsmiling picture of himself, sporting a suit jacket, a three-day beard, and a pair of fake eyeglasses, which he likes to wear for work, particularly when he’s meeting a chef for the first time. “I probably have twenty pairs,” he says.

  Arturo’s Italian background was Brett’s great good fortune. Arturo’s maternal great-great-grandfather had been the Prussian consul general to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; he found oil in Indonesia and sold out to John D. Rockefeller in 1900. The Ottolenghis were Italian Jews who converted to Catholicism during the war and donated a set of bronze doors to St. Peter’s Basilica. Growing up in New York, Arturo went by the name Milton, but he spent his summers at a large family property in Piedmont, where he developed a taste for white truffles, as well as the language skills that would come in handy when bargaining for them later on his son’s behalf. Arturo now runs a business that provides sandpaper to body shops and woodworkers. “I only work with consumables,” he says.

  For tenth grade, Brett went to St. Andrew’s, a boarding school in Delaware. To keep the Truffle Market going, he rented storage space from Arturo and paid his employees to pack and ship. From school, he handled orders and did the bookkeeping. Soon mushroom hunters all over the world were e-mailing him—Serbs and Croats and Chinese, primarily. Someone from Egypt sent him a box of the inexpensive, sandy desert truffles known as terfez. Foragers in Oregon sent him white truffles they had found, which he cooked up with scrambled eggs for the whole school. The school cook was his closest friend; they once ordered an alligator, grilled it, and served it in the dining room.

  The Croatian truffles were a revelation: the same species as the rarest and most expensive white Italians—Tuber magnatum—but not subject to the 100 percent tariff imposed on truffles entering the United States from the European Union. They became the Truffle Market’s main product. Brett left St. Andrew’s and finished high school at Mercersburg Academy, another boarding school, which was in Pennsylvania and closer to home. While there, he became an importer of Mogu pillows from Japan, and befriended local cheese-makers, who would deliver samples to his dorm room.

  Ottolenghi moved to Las Vegas in 2004, to attend UNLV’s William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration. He stored truffles in his room, offending his hallmates with the smell, and kept his cell phone on vibrate while in class, to field orders. Carless, he walked up and down the Strip with a little basket of truffles and a scale, making unannounced visits to chefs at the best restaurants and trying to talk them into buying an expensive luxury ingredient from a baby-faced, bespectacled nineteen-year-old freshman, sweating in his suit.

  • • •

  Storytelling may be the one indispensable skill in food-selling, but the richest histories of ingredients like those that Ottolenghi deals in tend to be suppressed. Ottolenghi once found beautiful huitlacoche—corn fungus—on a thirteen-acre farm in Florida. “All my family used to be in the citrus business,” the farmer told me when I called. “Then one night it got down to ten degrees. First they went broke, then they got dead. I was Br’er Bear at Disneyworld. Then I was a bartender. Then I got divorced and had to run away from my wife. Huitlacoche was my brother’s idea. We started doing it together, then we got in a fight and now I’m doing it on my own.”

  Wild products often come with even more obscure pedigrees. Huckleberries, fiddleheads, lichens, ramps, ferns, and, of course, mushrooms, are largely unregulated, potentially dangerous, fragile, precious, and scarce. Finding them is a scrounge. Often they represent stolen goods; a great deal of foraging takes place on government and private land, unpermitted. Iso Rabins is a sometime mushroom picker who ran San Francisco’s Underground Market—part church bake sale, part faerie bazaar, a place where you could buy DIY rearing-and-grinding
mealworm kits—until the health department shut him down. He told me, “Once a chanterelle gets into Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco it has this elitist air of a clean, pure, product from the mountains, untouched by man.” The truth, he said, is often less savory: tweakers driving dirty pickups into the national forest, mushroom buckets rattling around with the old beer cans. “Meth is a really good drug if you want to forage all the time,” Rabins said. “If you want to spend forty-eight hours looking at the ground, meth does a good job.” A major West Coast mushroom buyer told me that professional pickers tend to be “feral types.” He said he once turned on the news to see a guy he’d been using for a couple of years named a Most Wanted Person.

  Commercial foraging is largely subsistence work for marginal people with little connection to the gourmet status of the forest products they are gathering. Sometimes they may not even recognize their yield as edible. One Sunday in the winter of 2012, Belinda and Dan Conne, a couple in their late forties, went with their twenty-five-year-old son, Michael, and their pit bull, Jesse, into the Rogue River–Siskiyou National Forest, a wilderness area outside Gold Beach, Oregon, to pick black trumpets and hedgehogs. The Connes, who did obtain a permit, were amateurs, recent transplants from Oklahoma who had come to Gold Beach in search of work but found little available by the time they arrived in July. They moved into a tent at a campground and eventually into a camper with no electrical or water hookups. Belinda cleaned motel rooms for a few hours a week; Dan, scraggly-haired, tattooed, and missing several of his top teeth, had a back injury and couldn’t work.