Scott Conant, Chef/owner, D.O.C.G. & Scarpetta (Cosmopolitan)

“For our anniversary our first year dating, I took my wife to Piamonte [Italy] for truffles. We ate in 10 restaurants in five days. Truffles. Truffles and Barolo, and I rented a nice car and it was awesome. By the end of the trip—and this is all I’m going to say about this because she’s now my wife—our skin smelled like truffles. Everything tasted like truffles. It was one of the most sexy experiences because it’s so organic and it’s so earthy and there’s a perfume attached to it that is … you can’t explain it until you experience it.

I remember the first time I picked one up I couldn’t believe the cost on the thing, because I was a kid; I was a teenager, and this stuff was all foreign to me. Growing up in Waterbury, Connecticut, it’s not like we had truffles coming to the house, unfortunately. Shortly after that first experience, we did an event, and I’ll never forget it my whole life. Inside this restaurant, it was downstairs in the basement, and we had three piles of truffles in the prep kitchen. Three piles. There must have been easily 15 pounds of truffles, probably 20—lot of truffles. So the long and short of it was, as you walked in the front door of the restaurant, you were hit on the sidewalk with the scent of those truffles. Fabulous. I mean just amazing. I still think about that to this day.”