Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

I have wheedled from the maître d’. We have reserved a table at Bruno for our evening meal, which will mark the start of a truffle-eating extravaganza that will take us to Monaco and throughout the south of France. For lunch, I am content to eat and drink anything. The wine list at Bruno is a disaster, an homage to off-vintages, but perhaps that 2 6 2

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is appropriate—truffles only grow well in damp seasons, precisely when grapes are at their worst. Nevertheless, I select a perfect late-afternoon cheese wine, a white Graves with a pleasing bite of Sauvignon Blanc.

Instead of cheese, the waiter brings a surprise: a green salad with shaved black truffle slivers all over it. I particularly admire the tasty ends of the truffles that have broken off accidentally and been tossed into the salad; they look like chips of black diamonds, glittery and hard-edged, and they have crunch. Those bits are like the burnt ends of barbecued ribs. Then comes the cheese, which is soft and made of goat’s milk, which is no surprise, since we are in Provence, and that has black truffles over it, too. The finale is vanilla ice cream with truffled caramel sauce. Perhaps you would think, as I did, that fungus would not be a suitable complement for caramelized sugar, but the sauce is intense, earthy, and profound. Ben and Jerry take note: the ultimate mix-in has been found.

The French, as I’ve indicated, can be unyielding, but they can also be unpredictable and generous. The bill for each of our extravagant lunches is $17, tax and tip included. I have no reason to complain.

My room in the Hôtel de Paris looms over the legendary Monaco casino.

I stand on the balcony, fantasizing, as anyone who has seen Alfred Hitch-cock movies might. If I had the right mountaineering equipment, I could leap to the roof of the casino, rappel down the walls, swing through an open window, and start emptying safes. Maybe not me, but perhaps a more nimble individual who doesn’t eat constantly.

It is the day after dinner at Bruno, a meal that did not live up to the uncomplicated perfection of lunch. The fault lay not with the truffles but with the uses that the chef made of them. A barge-sized block of potato topped with shaved truffles came in a truffled cream sauce; no matter how you dress up a potato, you still end up with a spud. The primary virtue of this dish was its euphonious name—crème de truffes et truffes. (Truffe is supposedly a word for potato in archaic French.) The chef inserted truffles in a savory, slow-cooked shoulder of lamb.

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Although the cooking was expert, the truffles were ineffectual, overwhelmed by the intense lambiness of the meat.

Tonight I will eat at Le Louis XV, the Michelin three-star restaurant of Alain Ducasse, located on the ground floor of the hotel. In the days ahead I plan to have a dinner at La Beaugraviere, an unstarred country restaurant whose chef-owner, Guy Jullien, is famed for the simplicity and extravagance of his truffle preparations; lunch with Hervé Poron, owner of the Plantin truffle company; and dinner at the three-star Restaurant Troisgros, made dizzyingly famous by the brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros and now run by Michel, the son of Pierre. Naturally, I will participate in a truffle hunt. To visit Provence during truffle season and not see them unearthed is like traveling to Burgundy during the harvest season and not seeing grapes being picked. The great culinary rituals cannot be ignored.

Dinner at Le Louis XV begins with an amuse-bouche of raw winter vegetables with a truffle sauce that incorporates Barolo wine vinegar and parmesan cheese. It takes me a moment to recall that Le Louis XV is not a French restaurant; it is a Mediterranean restaurant very near the Italian border. This dish hints at the style of the chef de cuisine, Franck Cerutti, who uses the black truffle more as a condiment than an ingredient.

Roasted scallops arrive with slivers of black truffles and sit atop a black-truffle puree made with anchovies and capers. A black-truffle risotto is prepared with a black-truffle jus and discs of black truffles so perfectly round I’m reminded of casino chips (or perhaps I’m still obsessing about my imaginary escapade). The next dish demonstrates this restaurant’s absolute mastery of vegetables: it’s merely fennel, zucchini, artichokes, baby leeks, turnips, and beans in a sauce made with balsamic vinegar, black truffles, and olive oil, but the vegetables have been uplifted. They are a source of ecstasy, not earnestness. This sequence of dishes has proved to me that the black truffle is the world’s second-greatest condiment, outdone only by salt.

Like Bruno, Ducasse serves truffles with cheese. His is a Brie-style cheese with a fancy name that the chef has split open and stuffed 2 6 4

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with truffles. I can’t say it’s superior to the goat cheese and truffles at lunch the previous day. Like Bruno, Ducasse adds truffles to a caramel sauce, and here the three-star pedigree shows, for while Bruno’s was merely delicious, this smoother, richer version makes me light-headed with pleasure, to say nothing of deeply philosophical. As the meal ends, I ask my friends why black truffles were put on this earth. The answer we arrive at is that they give small dogs something to do.

The truffle hunter, the youngest of nine children, is nearing retirement.

I have driven from Monaco up into Provence to meet with him and his truffle-hunting dog, and he is not especially happy to make my acquaintance. He has made his living as a farmer, or at least he has tried to, and I am just another journalist fascinated by truffles who cares nothing of the plight of workingmen like him who can