Truffle Shuffle Season in Full $wing, With One Bargain in Queens

It's white truffle season, and if you've got moneys, you can haz truffles. (Unless you go to Woodside, but more on that in a minute.) Two years ago, after Le Cirque owner Sirio Maccioni paid $7,000 for a giant Alba White Truffle, his son Mauro got us hooked by shaving profligate piles of truffle onto plates of pasta and scrambled eggs. This year, midtown Italian restaurant Bottega Del Vino generously enabled us, with their new menu loaded with truffles.

Truffles are costly, there's no way around it (except, again, to schlep to Queens), but Bottega offers a reasonably-priced lunch serving of Tartina al Tartufo d’Alba for $35; that's an open-faced tartine with fontina and white truffle. During dinner service, the warm and colorful restaurant—wood columns and marble imported from Italy, crystal from the owner's glass company—fills up with tourists, truffle-addicts, and the occasional Trump. This used to be the Playboy Club, after all.

The house made Tagliolini al Tartufo d’Alba will make you feel like you've died and gone to heaven, and hopefully you still have your wallet when you fall back to earth ($105). There are plenty of other non-truffle options on the menu; also excellent is the grapefruit marinated Salmon carpaccio, served with fennel ($18). The wine list is mostly Italian and massive; the restaurant has 3,000 bottles in the leather-floored cellar—feel free to snoop around on your way to the restroom, but during our visit the cases were tightly locked. 79 East 59th Street, corner of Fifth; (212) 223-2724 (Seen here: Beef carpaccio with white truffles at Bottega Del Vino.)