Oliveto's Eighth Annual Truffle Dinners
Tuesday through Friday, November 16 - 19, 2004
 View menu (PDF)
Eight years ago we made our first trip to Italy to get the truffles for Oliveto's November event. We've found since then that availability, changing tariffs and USDA regulations, quality, and demand have made the seasons wildly different from year to year. But whatever the variation, getting the truffles ourselves has made for fresher, better cared for, less expensive, and more dependably available truffles than if they had come to us through a middleperson. And, to be honest, making the trip is really fun.
Each year we seem to beat the market in quality and price--a factor that was particularly pronounced last year. Early reports on 2003 truffles were bleak: because of a dry summer, truffles were scarce, of poor quality, and horrendously expensive. By autumn, though, because of the increasing popularity of truffles in this country, many restaurants in the Bay Area had scheduled and promoted truffle feasts, with fingers crossed.
We left for Italy not knowing what we would come back with, but we had the advantage by then of having good friends and sources who had grown to expect us every year. So when substantial rains finally came, and a tiny but superior crop was unearthed, our sources were pleased to sell us what they'd harvested. Thanks to our presence at the source, we were able to find truffles that were uniformly more fresh than in many years past, and even though the truffles were pricier than in years of abundance, we were able to proceed with our dinners. In general, though, the market had remained bad and, in the Bay Area, many truffle dinners had to be canceled.
This year, after a wet summer, northern Italy holds much better promise for truffle development. If the nights get very cold, if it rains a bit more (but not too much), and the moon is full at exactly the right time in the truffle growing cycle, we'll have loads of fabulous, fresh-out-of-the-ground truffles to be shaved over, or cooked in, the autumn dishes that comprise our Truffle Dinners menu. And they will be a perfect complement for some of our full-bodied red wines, such as the '99 Barbaresco by Produttori del Barbaresco, or '99 Conterno Barolo, or perhaps the 2001 Rosso di Montalcino by Flavio Fanti. Those wines exude the terroir of the soils from which our truffles will have been dug.
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