Anything That Moves (8 page)

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.

•   •   •

S
torytelling 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.

A neighbor in camp, seeing that they were struggling, taught Michael how to hunt for mushrooms—in addition to the black trumpets and hedgehogs, they found yellow feet, candy caps, and “channies”—which they sold to the local agent for a big mushroom buyer. (The agent they sold to, a Czech forager in his late fifties, pleaded guilty to trespassing in 2006, after being charged with using GPS to poach chanterelles from ranches in Lompoc. His advice to me: Don't get arrested in Santa Barbara County.) For black trumpets, a picker usually gets about five bucks a pound from a buyer, who marks them up 30 percent and sells them to a wholesaler, which sells them for 30 percent more to a retailer, which, depending on the season, doubles or quadruples the price and puts them on the shelves. A typical haul brought the Connes $50, enough to fill their car with gas, buy some propane, and get a few days' worth of groceries. “We did this so we could survive,” Belinda told me.

The Connes were having a good day, and, after emptying their buckets into bags in the car, decided to go back out again. Just as they got to a patch of trumpets it started to rain, and the woods grew dark. “We got up on them blacks,” Belinda said. “What we did, we were on the trail of the blacks, and we got greedy. We kept picking.” When they looked up, they realized they didn't know where they were. “It kept raining harder, getting darker and darker, so we bedded down for the night,” she said. Their lean-to collapsed in the storm. In the morning, it was still raining, and the Connes found that they were in the old growth, with no path out. Michael found a fallen tree, rotting and spacious enough for the three of them to sit inside; he hollowed a section of it clean with his knife, and they all crammed in, filling in the chinks with sticks and leaves so they wouldn't get wet. When afternoon came, they pulled large pieces of bark across the opening.

The last thing the Connes had eaten was a batch of peanut butter sandwiches on Sunday afternoon. In the tree, all night, they talked about food. Someone indelicately brought up the Donner Party. They watched big timber ants crawl along the inside of the log. “We thought about poppin' the heads off and eating them that way,” Belinda said, adding that the wiggling of a live one would have been too much for her. “That's a last resort. The worms I don't think I could ever do.” As for mushrooms, white buttons from the grocery store were the only kind they ate. Dan tried a hedgehog and spat it out; it was his first taste of the delicacy that had lured his family to the woods, and he found it repulsive. “My husband said if we come down to starvin' that we could eat them,” Belinda said. His other idea—eat Jesse—was overruled. “Michael and I said we would take one of our legs first,” Belinda said. “I would starve to death before I could eat a dog. A squirrel? Yes, I could. But a
dog
?” They placed all their hopes on rescue.

Dan's back hurt so badly that he couldn't move. Michael fell in the creek while collecting water in a ziplock bag and developed hypothermia. The frostbite on his feet turned to trench. Belinda, who also had frostbite, watched her son grow weaker, and was sure that he was going to die. On Thursday, Dan turned to her and said, “Today's the day when they're going to start notifying the next of kin.” They listened to the helicopters overhead and tried in vain to signal them with the face of a dead cell phone and the blade of a buck knife. Still, for six days they didn't eat a thing, until—on the day before the search mission would have changed from rescue to recovery—they were spotted and flown to a hospital. Grateful to have escaped with his life, Dan broke his fast with pepperoni sticks and Doritos.

•   •   •

T
he world Brett operates in, it's a lot of backdoor bullshit and making deals,” an old Vegas hand and a friend of Ottolenghi's said. Corruption is rampant. “You'll have a food-and-beverage VP that goes with a certain purveyor because he says, ‘I'll sell you crab legs for the buffet and write you a personal check for ten percent of whatever we do. You'll make two hundred and fifty grand because you buy two and a half million in crab.'” Another chef told me about a couple of fast-talking local seafood venders, an Italian who looks Spanish and a Spaniard who looks Italian. “They have very raspy voices, like something out of a scene in a Mafia movie,” he said. “They do this bait-and-switch thing, telling you stories, and before you know it there's a thousand pounds of tuna waiting at your back door.”

Las Vegas's Butter Man, Clint Arthur, says, “It's very cutthroat.” He sells 85-percent-butterfat butter to the chefs at Aureole, Payard, Jean Georges Steakhouse, and Restaurant Guy Savoy, and once designed an extra-salty butter for David Werly, the executive chef at Le Cirque. “The thing you have to understand is that food is a perishable item; it must be purchased, and someone is going to make money on it. These deals typically last for years, they're worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and people resort to extreme measures, including sometimes illegal measures, to try to get clients. I've seen high-end chefs in Las Vegas fired for taking money under the table from suppliers.”

As the Butter Man, Arthur, who is also the author of a series of inspirational lectures on how to double your income, goes to chef meetings dressed in a button-down shirt in “butter yellow” and a pair of yellow Crocs. Most of the vegetable exotica in town comes from Lee Jones, who has a family farm in Huron, Ohio, where he raises rhubarb “the thickness of three pencil leads,” miniature cucumbers with tiny yellow blossoms, and heirloom champagne ice beets, for sorbets. His produce travels by FedEx and is ready to be served within twenty-four hours of harvest. When he comes to Las Vegas himself, he is Farmer Lee, and wears the uniform he has trademarked with the U.S. Attorney General's office: dark blue overalls, white shirt, red bow tie. “It's the authentic real deal,” he says. “Colonel Sanders has the white suit and the goatee. Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's, always wore a short-sleeve shirt. It gives us an identity.”

The city's senior caviar purveyor is Barry Katcher—or Barry Beluga, as he calls himself—who has been selling to the casinos for more than twenty years. His family started in caviar in 1942, when his grandfather and great-uncle emigrated from Russia to Brooklyn. His great-uncle, a cobbler, sold it from a shoeshine box in front of a relative's pharmacy, and came to be known as the Caviar Baron. Caviar Royale, Katcher's company, is, he says, the largest supplier to the hotel-casino industry in the United States. I went to see him—petite and deeply tanned, in late middle age, wearing black down to a pair of platform Skechers—at his retail store, on a stretch of Industrial Road behind Caesars Palace. “Everyone should know where it is,” he told me, when I asked for directions. “When the cabs bring customers here to buy liquor I give them a free sandwich.” His nickname, he said, originated with a radio personality whose show he used to call in to while making his runs to the airport at 3:30 a.m. “Once, I was sent an illegal shipment of caviar—the guys that got it got it illegally—and I said, ‘Hey, I've got seven cars around me with blue markings and their lights on.' It was the FDA. They followed me back here and in front of them I opened twenty tins. It was all live on the air.” Katcher sees perfidy everywhere: two-faced purchasing agents, fake beluga, competitors who bribe buyers or—worse—milk him for information and then try to take his customers. “See all these knives in my back?” he said. When I mentioned that Ottolenghi had started representing caviar, he winced and said, “Piece of shit.”

The pitch that Ottolenghi makes is for integrity, a posture he communicates with unfashionable brown suits, brown leather shoes, and the fake glasses. “It's a very specific look,” he says. “Almost professorial.” Being well, if humbly, dressed prevents him from getting stopped by security while sneaking around the back corridors of casinos. “Look like you're supposed to be here,” he told me, ineffectually, as we skulked around. Besides, light suits in Las Vegas say VIP host (the slick fixers employed by nightclubs to cater to important customers), which doesn't inspire the trust of chefs. He thinks of himself as an educator and a reformer—teaching chefs about the virtues of the products he is selling, not to mention what is wrong with the wares of his competitors—and prides himself on his bold moves. When he knew that the venerable French chef Joël Robuchon would be in town because one of his restaurants had ordered six of Ottolenghi's bellota hams for a party, he dropped in on him, hoping to present a Spanish caviar that he had recently added to his inventory. “I just gave Chef Robuchon the caviar sample despite not having a meeting,” he wrote me in a gleeful text message. “Everyone was looking at me as if I had interrupted the Pope.”