Summer dining in New York City has its pleasures. During the doldrums of August, most of the city has cleared out; reservations are easy to come by, restaurants are pleasantly un-full, and the late-summer produce is put to incredible use. But all is not well. There is also something horrible lurking on lots of August menus around town. Something so insipid and insidious that it threatens to ruin your meal without the slightest hint of remorse. I speak, of course, of the summer truffle. This flavorless, aroma-free lump of fungus is a poor warm weather stand-in for its autumn and winter brethren. The summer truffle has none of the qualities that make, um, real truffles so desirable. Usually imported from Umbria, the summer truffle has a shelf life that makes it desirable for chefs when the real things aren't available. Of course, since summer truffles are squishy things with no flavor to begin with, how do you even know when they've gone bad? At a très fancy restaurant in midtown that I won't name (because I've since had some really good meals there), nearly half of the dishes on offer during an August tasting menu last year came topped with summer truffles, shaven dutifully at the table by a white-gloved waiter. My dining companion, who hates mushrooms and despises truffles, was able to eat every bite of her dish, commenting on how great it was that the truffles didn't have any flavor. Well, that's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it, as I did last week eating a pasta dish topped with shaved summer truffles, is that it's sheer stupidity. This was at a different restaurant than before, but the little black and beige shavings, as one might expect, still had no flavor of their own (though they were thankfully shaved over the dish in the kitchen, saving us and our waiter the embarrassment of going through that whole charade, pretending these things were any good). Instead, the decidedly not-quite-but-almost-truffle aroma emanating from the dish came from another source: truffle oil. In addition to pumping up the perceived flavor of the truffle with a chemical-based ingredient, it seems that this restaurant was also just looking for a way to pump up the dish's price. Ugh. But fear not, truffle lovers! There's hope in sight for truffles in the summertime. At Chicago's Alinea, the famous "Hot Potato" dish comes with a slice of black truffle draped over a parmesan potato ball. Eating there during the last week in July, I thought that this truffle was going to ruin my otherwise outstanding dinner ("transcendent" might be a better word, now that I think about it). But one bite and, lo and behold, it tasted...like a truffle! Turns out that Alinea's summertime truffles are a newfangled type from Australia, where it's actually truffle season. The quality was astounding. Granted, most restaurants don't charge upwards of $500 for dinner for two (that's without wine), so flying in truffles from Australia might be out of the question. But there is another solution for restaurants: just wait a few months for the real things to become available again, and stop trying to pawn these terrible things off on your customers.
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