Truffles at Otto

I've gone to Otto for lunch off and on since the last blog post, but none of the experiences were worth blogging about until the husband decided to be nice and organise a truffle meal just for the sake of having done it. We read somewhere that the white truffles were from the Langhe area of the Piedmont region in northern Italy and from the countryside around Alba.

The menu looks deceptively cheap, but these are all pre-truffle prices. If I don't recall incorrectly, shavings were $14 per gram.

An amuse bouche of smoked duck and mashed something. Not very memorable.

My starter was the scrambled egg with blue swimmer crab and white truffle ($19). It came looking like a rather thick paste.
The husband ordered the mushroom soup with foie gras morsels and white truffles ($19). So we were wondering for a while - where where the truffles?
And voila - they appeared in the form of ugly knobs on a weighing scale.
As the waiter shaved the truffles onto the plate, I could smell the aroma. It was amazing! The taste of the egg before and after the truffes was so different.
The husband's soup - after. The flavour of the mushroom soup was so nicely enhanced by those thin shavings. We were weak and truffle-laden. Heh.
I ordered the homemade egg tagliolini with white truffle and white truffle emulsion ($26). I got excited just by looking at the texture of the pasta. I love freshly-made pasta.
The waiter gamely brought over a huge truffle so I could photograph it.
This was huge! Alas we couldn't eat it all.
Hard at work shaving over the pasta.

The glorious end result
The husband's dutch veal scaloppine with marsala wine and white truffle ($38). I'm not a veal fan so I wasn't too sure about this, but he enjoyed it.
I would rank this among one of the best pastas ever. Al dente, flavourful, and bursting full of truffle flavour. I wished I could have ordered another plate.

The greedy boy ordered the white truffle creme brulee for dessert.
It was insane. I've never tasted anything like it - sweet cream so evenly infused with truffle flavour, and super smooth too.

The bill was a bomb, but it was worth every penny. We agreed that we would not eat at another fancy restaurant for the rest of the year. That's why our New Year's Eve dinner is going to be teochew muay.