Gigi, the dog of Renato Agnello, a white-truffle hunter, holds a truffle in his mouth after finding it in the woods of Barbaresco near Alba in the Italian northern region of Piemonte. Billionaire Stanley Ho spent US$330,000 on white truffles and then didn't eat them.
Photograph by: Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images, Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images
What's more extravagant than spending US$330,000 on two white truffles, the pricey fungi popular with foodies around the world? Spending US$330,000 on the mushrooms and then not even eating them. Billionaire Stanley Ho, the casino king of Macau, did just that at a London auction last month. According to a truffle expert, the large, aged Italian specimens Ho bought — "grand champions," in industry parlance — were not the sort you'd want to sprinkle on your risotto. "They're mostly or entirely unusable for culinary concerns," says Britt Bunyard, publisher of Fungi magazine. "They're over-mature, split open, and often have bad or decomposed parts. The truffle connoisseur would pass them over for younger, fresher ones."
