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.
• • •
The 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 mentio
n 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.”
• • •
Caviar—so dear, so highly controlled, so easily concealed—is the cocaine of food. It comes from the virgin eggs of sturgeon, prehistoric fish of massive proportions. The beluga, or Huso huso, is the biggest; it can grow to more than three thousand pounds, and live for a hundred years. The Caspian Sea once teemed with them; in the early nineteenth century, a twenty-four-foot-long female was caught in the Volga estuary.
People have been preserving sturgeon eggs for millennia; for the Phoenicians, they were a food of famine. But by the mid-twentieth century, caviar was a luxury good, an extra-special specialty item. “Even the Russians took part,” noted a report on the second Fancy Food Show, in 1956. “They displayed caviar aimed at exciting the palates of capitalists.” It takes around fifteen years for a sturgeon to mature. Theocracies and dictators were good beluga stewards, but with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, overfishing and poaching threatened Huso huso, along with other sturgeon species prized for their roe, with extinction. “Everyone with a rowboat is out on the Caspian tossing sturgeon into the backs of their boats,” a U.S. Customs agent told the Los Angeles Times in the late nineties.
In 1998, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) started setting quotas on the harvesting of wild Caspian caviar. Some years, the amount deemed safe to take was none. In 2005, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service banned the importation of beluga, which had recently been added to the endangered species list. Beluga prices spiked, encouraging smugglers and imposters. The less beluga there was, the more “beluga” there was: some of it real, some of it fake, all of it illegal. A Warsaw police officer in charge of an anti-organized-crime unit was arrested at JFK with six accomplices and sixteen suitcases full of undeclared beluga, and special agents from U.S. Fish and Wildlife started to perform DNA tests on incoming caviar shipments, looking for fraud.
The restrictions on caviar have spawned a mini-industry of neologisms based on deep faith in the power of association. Label-imagery, Morris Kushner might have called it. “Beluga,” which conjures visions of oligarchs, is the magic word. The largest caviar importer in America, Marky’s, which is based in Miami, offers on its website “Prime B Dark Osetra Private Stock Caviar known as Beluga Type Caviar,” which is about as meaningful as describing an African elephant as “Dark Gray Special Reserve Animal known as Lion Type Animal.” The COO assured me that the company was going to revise its website soon. “This was written to indicate what others have called it,” he said. “There is so much confusion.”
One thing, at least, was clear. Before the ban, Marky’s aquaculture branch brought fifty-five live Huso huso into the United States; when the fish mature in several years the company will have a federally enforced monopoly on beluga in the U.S. market. Another importer has registered the name River Beluga to refer to Huso dauricus, a sturgeon native to the Amur River, on the border of Russia and China. Huso dauricus, commonly known as kaluga, is a relative of beluga, but not a close one. One distributor I talked to, who deals in Huso dauricus raised on a farm in China, said that his importer invoices it to him as “beluga hybrid,” which is how he represents it to the restaurants he supplies. “The beluga name is what consumers know, but there’s no wild beluga on the market,” he said. “You have people reaching out, saying, ‘What’s the next best thing?’ You’re paying for the scarcity of the species.”
In 2000, when the embargo against Iran was loosened, Behroush Sharifi, an Iranian-born, English-educated, American Deadhead with a gigantic beard, decided to start importing from the Middle East. First it was carpets. Then he moved into botanicals: saffron, barberries, and manna from Iran; red hibiscus from Lebanon; mastic, a kind of ancient chewing gum, from Greece. Anointing himself the Saffron King, he trafficked in the ancient, storied, strange, and scarce. His customers were famous New York restaurants like Babbo, Daniel, Jean Georges, WD-50. Around the time he started his business, a friend at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) asked him for help. The group was petitioning Fish and Wildlife to add beluga to the endangered species list; the agency had missed a deadline to respond and now the NRDC could bring a lawsuit but needed a plaintiff. Sharifi had grown up spending summers on the Caspian, and had flirted with importing Iranian caviar. Helped by his testimony about the devastation of the fishery, beluga was added to the list, clearing the way for the 2005 ban. “Many foodies would be angry that I’d removed something so precious,” he said.
In the absence of wild-caught Caspian caviar, a market for domestic roe, farmed and fished, has opened up. California has been producing caviar since the seventies, when the overthrow of the shah of Iran inspired fears—hopes?—of a shortage; now Petrossian carries it. Paddlefish eggs are coming out of the Ozarks; bowfin roe from the Atchafalaya Swamp gets exported to Moscow. (The FDA allows these products to be called caviar, but purists say that designation belongs only to sturgeon eggs.) On farms, delivery does not always mean death: some aquacultivators induce ovulation with synthetic oxytocin—Pitocin, which stimulates uterine contractions, is one—and then “milk” the fish, while others have experimented with cesarean sections. “It’s not lost on me that a lovely unintended consequence of making caviar illegal is that it allows for this emergence, this wonderful domestic product,” Sharifi told me. It is a product he has come to have a special feeling for, now that a new trade embargo has made importing saffron and other Iranian products illegal again. “Principles are one thing but you have to have bread in the bowl,” he told me, explaining that he is now a seller of American caviar.
Ottolenghi’s caviar, from a Mediterranean sturgeon called Acipenser naccarii, is raised sustainably on a farm in Grenada, and prepared according to a traditional Iranian recipe. I met Philippe Barbier, the recipe master, in Spain: a French Basque with deep-set green eyes, a reddish beard, a yellow front tooth, and unlaced shoes. Driving through the countryside, he said that the culinary potential for farmed caviar was much greater than for the revered beluga, which no one dared serve other than with toast points and riced egg. The lower price of his stuff made it more like any other raw ingredient. “Chefs seem receptive—they’re just looking for reassurance that it’s a product no one will think they’re silly for using,” he said. Michel Troisgros, the Michelin three-star chef at Maison Troisgros, in Paris, was using his caviar, he said, to make payusnaya, a paste that he formed into a thin sheet and wrapped around a soft-boiled quail egg. “When you cut it, all the yolk is coming out, like a little volcano!” he said. Troisgros had also filled the channels of cooked endive with the caviar and shaped them into black-and-white roses.
After Ottolenghi visited the farm with Barbier, he returned to Las Vegas determined to break into the room-service and private-jet menus of all the big casinos. Hopeful, he went to a major casino and presented the caviar to a team of chefs. They loved it; they especially loved the price. But then one of them asked if Ottolenghi could call it “beluga,” as their current supplier was doing. “I told the exec chef what they were doing is illegal in front of 8 chefs and walked out,” he wrote me in a text message. The next day, he wrote to me again, saying that he now had all the information he needed to show the casino that its caviar was illegally labeled. “So we should be able to get the business.” If all else failed, he had put in a call to the authorities to get his competitor slapped.
• • •
Ottolenghi lives in a single-story stucco house he shares with his college roommate, Howie, wh
o actually is a VIP host at Tao, the nightclub made famous by Tiger Woods and, with 1,400 covers on a peak night, one of the top-grossing restaurants in America. When I visited him in 2010, Ottolenghi was getting ready to open a small retail store, near the airport, where he hoped that chefs would shop on their days off. The living room was crowded with cans of Spanish olive oil, French green lentils, hand-kneaded fettuccine, specialty vinegar made by an ornery vintner in Napa, a huge bag of Szechuan peppercorns, and sixteen kinds of salt. In the kitchen cabinets, there were old balsamics and samples of water from all over the world, which Ottolenghi, researching for a special project, had tasted only after a twenty-four-hour fast. His fridge was full of awkward little pancakes of payusnaya, which, drawing on the Troisgros example, he was trying to interest his chefs in. Four long chest freezers full of bone-in hams and foie gras lobes lined the garage. A cream-colored 1951 Chevy panel truck, in which Sidney, the Artisanal Foods driver, makes deliveries, was parked out front.
Beside the front door was a small pond, which was home to three sturgeon—pets, Ottolenghi said, that also served as props. Several weeks before, he had bought a fish tank from a pet store, then called his domestic caviar supplier, in California, and asked if they could send him some sturgeon. He started going to chef meetings to pitch the Spanish caviar with one in tow. “He comes in with this fish tank sloshing water to show us what a sturgeon is,” Alessandro Stratta told me. “I said, ‘I know what a sturgeon is.’ Next time, he’ll come in here with a pig!” (Stratta placed an order.)
One morning, Ottolenghi went to the airport to pick up Helena Gonzalez, a beautiful twenty-seven-year-old Salvadoran woman whose parents started making foie gras in Sonoma, California, in the mid-eighties, and a better prop by a long shot than a sturgeon in a tank. Her foie gras was one of Ottolenghi’s special products: it had the glow that comes from being obscenely delicious, extremely expensive (around $80 a pound), and soon to be unavailable. Foie gras, or “fatty liver,” is made by gavage, force-feeding corn to ducks or geese until their livers swell to ten times their natural size. Animal-rights activists consider the feeding regimen to be torture, and in 2005 Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was at the time the governor of California, signed legislation to ban the sale and production of foie gras. Sonoma Artisan Foie Gras, the Gonzalezes’ company, was the state’s one producer. In deference to them, the bill was given a long sunset: they had until July 1, 2012, to invent a method of production that did not involve gavage, or close down. It was a rather hopeless proposition. Foie gras has been made the same way since the time of the Pharoahs.
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