WHAT is claimed to have been the world’s most expensive truffle, bought last month for a record-breaking £28,000, has ended up in an ignominious grave, buried in a London garden before anyone could get a taste of it.

An habitués’ syndicate of customers at the Zafferano restaurant in London, said to include Gwyneth Paltrow and Roman Abramovich, helped the restaurant to buy the truffle at a charity auction last month. Weighing in at 850g (1lb 14oz), it was one of the largest of the current crop.

But the excitement and publicity surrounding its purchase was such that the restaurant was overwhelmed for days with people who wanted to see, touch, smell and even be photographed with the acquisition.

Although an unfeeling colleague on the staff of The Times described the truffle, unearthed at San Miniato near Pisa in Tuscany, as “like a fossilised dinosaur dropping — grey, lumpy and spectacularly unappetising”, the Zafferano restaurant manager, Enzo Cassini, insisted yesterday: “It was a most beautiful specimen, quite wonderful to behold. People travelled even from Spain just to smell it.” It was the truffle’s widespread allure that proved its undoing, because Mr Cassini thinks that its fragile structure must have begun to deteriorate in the five days during which it was exhibited.

What clinched it, though, was that Andy Needham, the restaurant’s chef, then locked it in a downstairs fridge and took the keys with him while he went on a three-day trip to Italy to buy yet more truffles. By the time he returned, and the fridge door was reopened, the magnificent tuber had collapsed into a mouldy sludge, unfit to serve, or even show, to anyone.

The truffle has meanwhile been interred in a flowered grave near a tree.

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