American Truffle Company grows Périgord black truffles in America, harvests to order, and delivers them ultra-fresh, overnight.

By then Robert Chang had eaten his way across three continents — balut in Saigon, percebes off the Costa da Morte in Galicia, fugu in Shimonoseki, mullet roe from southwestern Taiwan, and sea urchin cracked open on the deck of a Hokkaido fishing boat. Almost none of it was pretty. All of it was worth the trip.

He had never eaten a truffle.

He was two years into a posting in Germany — there for the same reason he had gone to Japan a decade earlier, curious how a country flattened by a war rebuilds itself into an economy — when he found the special chalked up in an Italian place in Munich. Tagliatelle, butter, shaved black truffle. He ordered it.

He was hooked immediately. Not by the look of it, which was a simple plate of buttered pasta, but by the extraordinary aroma, which was like nothing he had encountered on three continents.

The question followed him back to California. He went looking for someone who could answer it — across Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand. There was no shortage of experts. Nearly all of them offered folklore: methods handed down, results promised, nothing that could be tested, published, or repeated. He wanted evidence.

Almost nobody had any.

They work under the model Paul built before there was an American Truffle Company: we take a share of what the orchard produces rather than a consulting fee, which means we are paid when our growers are paid and not before. It is the least convenient way to run this business. It is also the only version where everyone at the table wants the same thing.

You’ll meet them properly. Every shipment carries a QR code that opens a page belonging to that truffle alone — the date and hour it was harvested, the farm, the region, the hunter’s name, the dog’s name, and a film shot on that farm. Meet the hunter and dog who hunt the farm your truffle came from.

We’ll tell you the region. We won’t tell you the coordinates. Those grounds have been guarded for generations, and we’re not the ones to stop.

Chef Ken Frank of Michelin-starred La Toque in Napa has cooked with truffles for more than 35 years — widely considered the top truffle chef in North America, and the first and only American chef invited to the Fiera Internazionale del Tartufo Bianco d’Alba (International Alba White Truffle Festival), where he was knighted by the Order of the Knights of the Truffle and Wines of Alba. He’s also host chef of the Napa Truffle Festival. In his 42nd year running an all-black-truffle menu, he has gone through, by his own count, a couple of tons of truffles. He cooks with our truffles, and so do others: these are the same truffles we supply to Michelin-starred American kitchens.

The work runs well past Napa. Robert speaks five languages — English, Mandarin, Japanese, German, and Spanish — which is why he has been invited to address Spanish truffle festivals and congresses in Spanish rather than through an interpreter. Those conversations have become working relationships across Spain, Italy, Argentina, Chile, and Australia. Truffle growing is a small world that talks to itself in half a dozen languages, and we are in the room for most of it.