He’s just started his studies in hotel administration, but Brett Ottolenghi already has access to some of the city’s top chefs. The UNLV freshman is their truffle connection. Though just 19, he’s a veteran in the business of marketing this prized and pungent delicacy.
Ottolenghi could have stayed closer to his hometown of Gettysburg, Penn., for college — he was accepted at Cornell and Boston universities. But ultimately he chose UNLV, both for its acclaimed hotel curriculum and for its location.
“There are so many upscale restaurants in Las Vegas,” he says. “I believed there was a lot of potential to do business here.”
He launched the Truffle Market as a website when he was just 13 years old. He had sampled truffles for the first time at a San Francisco restaurant and wondered why they were so expensive.
The boy with a preternatural mind for business — he bought Ben & Jerry’s stock in second grade — enlisted the help of his father, Arturo, to invest in a few thousand dollars’ worth of truffles and sell them online. “It was a hobby, an experiment,” Ottolenghi says. “I wanted to learn more about business and see if I could actually do it.”
A little research into the aromatic tubers only fueled his fascination. Truffles are a fungus that grows on tree roots, mostly in Italy and France, and only under precise conditions. A pound of fresh black truffles goes for about $700 this season, while the same amount of the delicate white winter truffles costs more than three times as much.
At those prices, Ottolenghi’s “experiment” grossed about $120,000 in sales last year. He’s expanded his offerings beyond fresh and jarred truffles to include oils, vinegars, butters, and juices made with the tuber, as well as fresh goat’s cheese.
His customers are largely home gourmets, Ottolenghi says, but he has started branching out to wholesale. His client list has grown to include luminaries on the Las Vegas dining scene and beyond, such as vintner Robert Mondavi and the chefs at the MGM Mansion.
Ottolenghi recently had the thrill of meeting chef Thomas Keller of the new Bouchon at the Venetian, calling him “a big inspiration.” Keller’s chefs are especially discriminating, he says.
“They don’t want to just buy truffles,” Ottolenghi says. “They say, ‘Call us if you get something in that’s the best you’ve ever seen.’”
A truffle transaction is a discreet affair, Ottolenghi says. “Once in the kitchen, I open the box and lay it out with a scale next to it. It seems like something illicit. Very often we don’t even discuss the price. I just remember what the chef picked out.”
Ottolenghi’s interest in food goes beyond business. He’s taking courses in biology and studies the science of food on his own, particularly new methods in mushroom and truffle cultivation. He’s now experimenting with winemaking; with the return on his Truffle Market investment, he planted a 1.5-acre vineyard at a family apple orchard in Pennsylvania.
But he’s not ready to leave his core product behind yet. “I see the business expanding beyond truffles, but they’ll certainly remain a part of it,” Ottolenghi says. “I’d like to have a company that people can trust to monitor the quality of all the products.”
