Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear Page B

“The thing you have to understand is that food is a perishable item; it must be purchased, and someone is going to make money on it. These deals typically last for years, they’re worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and people resort to extreme measures, including sometimes illegal measures, to try to get clients. I’ve seen high-end chefs in Las Vegas fired for taking money under the table from suppliers.”
    As the Butter Man, Arthur, who is also the author of a series of inspirational lectures on how to double your income, goes to chef meetings dressed in a button-down shirt in “butter yellow” and a pair of yellow Crocs. Most of the vegetable exotica in town comes from Lee Jones, who has a family farm in Huron, Ohio, where he raises rhubarb “the thickness of three pencil leads,” miniature cucumbers with tiny yellow blossoms, and heirloom champagne ice beets, for sorbets. His produce travels by FedEx and is ready to be served within twenty-four hours of harvest. When he comes to Las Vegas himself, he is Farmer Lee, and wears the uniform he has trademarked with the U.S. Attorney General’s office: dark blue overalls, white shirt, red bow tie. “It’s the authentic real deal,” he says. “Colonel Sanders has the white suit and the goatee. Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, always wore a short-sleeve shirt. It gives us an identity.”
    The city’s senior caviar purveyor is Barry Katcher—or Barry Beluga, as he calls himself—who has been selling to the casinos for more than twenty years. His family started in caviar in 1942, when his grandfather and great-uncle emigrated from Russia to Brooklyn. His great-uncle, a cobbler, sold it from a shoeshine box in front of a relative’s pharmacy, and came to be known as the Caviar Baron. Caviar Royale, Katcher’s company, is, he says, the largest supplier to the hotel-casino industry in the United States. I went to see him—petite and deeply tanned, in late middle age, wearing black down to a pair of platform Skechers—at his retail store, on a stretch of Industrial Road behind Caesars Palace. “Everyone should know where it is,” he told me, when I asked for directions. “When the cabs bring customers here to buy liquor I give them a free sandwich.” His nickname, he said, originated with a radio personality whose show he used to call in to while making his runs to the airport at 3:30 a.m. “Once, I was sent an illegal shipment of caviar—the guys that got it got it illegally—and I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got seven cars around me with blue markings and their lights on.’ It was the FDA. They followed me back here and in front of them I opened twenty tins. It was all live on the air.” Katcher sees perfidy everywhere: two-faced purchasing agents, fake beluga, competitors who bribe buyers or—worse—milk him for information and then try to take his customers. “See all these knives in my back?” he said. When I mentioned that Ottolenghi had started representing caviar, he winced and said, “Piece of shit.”
    The pitch that Ottolenghi makes is for integrity, a posture he communicates with unfashionable brown suits, brown leather shoes, and the fake glasses. “It’s a very specific look,” he says. “Almost professorial.” Being well, if humbly, dressed prevents him from getting stopped by security while sneaking around the back corridors of casinos. “Look like you’re supposed to be here,” he told me, ineffectually, as we skulked around. Besides, light suits in Las Vegas say VIP host (the slick fixers employed by nightclubs to cater to important customers), which doesn’t inspire the trust of chefs. He thinks of himself as an educator and a reformer—teaching chefs about the virtues of the products he is selling, not to mention what is wrong with the wares of his competitors—and