He holds up one of the baseballs. "This is an hour truffle. When you've been out there for a long time, and your back hurts, and you haven't found any, you find one like this and you're good for another hour. Here, you can keep this one." I set it down next to my plate, and immediately the smell starts wafting up into the room, like a little fungal bomb.

The truffle beef Stroganoff arrives, buried beneath a pile of black-truffle shavings. Then comes black-truffle ice cream, a cheesecake with candy-cup-mushroom sauce, and a black-truffle latte, with black-truffle shavings sitting atop the foam. There's so much truffle here, I feel like I'm visiting a cult. I've never eaten so much fungus in one sitting.

"What happens if you eat too many truffles?" I ask. "You die of bliss!" Czarnecki announces, refilling our glasses. He then goes on to say that truffles are always emitting gas and heat, and a few minutes after you start eating, it will hit your stomach and release the gas. "It's a fragrant burp," he admits. "We call it the Truffle Burp."

While I'm waiting for this phenomenon, I realize that Czarnecki is living the chef's dream. He's winning awards in a region that is just now getting recognition for its excellent Pinot Noir wines and truffles that threaten Europe's old-world standards.

Czarnecki loves the Euro/American controversy. "It's a sense of culinary tension - that's part of the fun of exposing people to it. Nobody quite wants to believe it, that we have good truffles. It's my new crusade."

He drops the truffle into a plastic bag and hands it over with a smile. "You can use it anytime, or you can wait up to a week."