Photography Courtesy of Mike Johnson
Restaurateur, entrepreneur, raconteur. All of these apply to Greg Perez, the St. Louis food community’s unique combination of innovative chef, getting-elder statesman, and merry prankster.
In his most recent culinary adventure, Perez embarked on a quest for his own personal magic mushrooms at the Fiera Internazionale del Tartufo Bianco d’Alba, the Italian city’s white truffle festival.
Perez sat down with SLM after his return and recounted his adventure, augmenting the oral history with snippets from the journal he kept while he was there.
October 29: Perez and fellow serial restaurateur Mike Johnson meet at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. After 14 hours on a plane and four more on trains, they arrive in Alba.
The first taste of white truffles was a €100 (about $140) pizza! It was amazing—the smell, the taste. All they did was put a half ounce of day-fresh Alba truffles all over it. What are the poor people eating? You have to learn to say “Basta!” (Enough!), or they’ll just keep going.
October 30: The intrepid duo needs no alarm clock, because the town church bell starts ringing on the hour at 6 a.m. They’re at the festival soon after it opens at 9 a.m.
As we walked to the festival, the only thing it could remind me of was the harvest festival in Humboldt County. I know that sounds crazy. But other than a barbecue cook-off, I never attended a festival where you could smell it before you got there.
In a coincidence too good to be a hallucination, it turns out that their host, Giovanni, owns a nearby farm and winery—and has truffles on his property. Giovanni also is good friends with Flavio, one of the leading truffle hunters in the area.
Flavio was your typical vision of an old Italian truffle hunter, and Mickey the truffle dog was just as old—a little limp, glaucoma, and gray hair around his nose. But his nose is all that matters. Off to the woods we go with a metal-tipped cane, a pocket full of dog treats, and a small pick for digging.
November 2: Johnson heads back to St. Louis, but Perez stays on for a couple of days to conduct his transactions. Back at the festival, he comments on how one truffle was clearly nibbled on by a snail. He can pick up on such subtleties because of his days with the French truffle expert Bruno Clément, known as “le roi de la truffe” (the king of truffles).
OK, as usual, I’m going to run the gantlet. I bought a half kilo from Flavio and had them Cryovacked in Tupperware that I’m going to put in a small backpack and hope for the best. I am going on the premise that they won’t smell and they won’t be checking my bag. If they do, I can say they were a gift and are for personal consumption.
That leaves 2 ½ kilos to fill his desired take-home quota and less than a full day to get his orders placed with a broker. With only a few hours left to catch a train to Milan, he rings a doorbell at a recommended broker’s office. An interrupted lunch and some rapid negotiations later, he’s on the way to Milan, with his additional 2 ½ kilos scheduled for shipment to St. Louis. He’s earmarked his purchased truffles much like one would mark golf balls, a requisite trick for ensuring that the buyer receives the exact truffles he’s picked out.
But he also remembers that truffles are supposed to be washed for importation into the U.S. So at midnight the night before his flight, in the bathroom of his room in the Milan airport Sheraton, he opens the Tupperware, breaks the Cryovac seal, and washes his personal stash. “The whole room just reeked,” Perez says.
November 5: The final step is passing the truffles through Milan airport security and U.S. Customs in New York undetected. At his third checkpoint in Milan, just a few minutes before boarding closes for his flight, he’s pulled aside.
They want to check my bag and all the police are waiting to see what the problem is. I’m thinking truffles, of course. But no—it’s the magnifying glass I brought to inspect the truffles. I asked if there was a problem, and he said if there was a problem, I would know.
In New York, Perez gets pulled aside again. “You’ve got an X on your passport. Get over there,” says the agent. As it turns out, it means only that someone put an X on his passport. Maybe he just looks like the kind of guy who should be pulled aside.
A few hours later, Perez and his half kilo are in his apartment. The additional 2 ½ kilos from the broker come in two days later, and orders keep arriving regularly until December. Perez shares the truffles with restaurateurs across St. Louis. Another leg of his long, strange trip is concluded.
