When the bartender told chef Andrew Richardson there was a man at the bar wanting to sell him truffles, he thought it was a joke.

At the time about five years ago, Mr. Richardson was part-owner of Blink, a restaurant in Calgary. He looked out from the kitchen in disbelief. However, the man at the bar insisted the chef look at the mushrooms in his bulging Safeway bag.

"He opened the bag and it was overflowing in truffles, black truffles, that still had the soil on them," the chef said. The soil was important because it helps keep the moisture in the truffles, giving them a longer shelf life.

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The bag had about four kilograms of burgundy truffles from Croatia, worth around $10,000. Mr. Richardson purchased two kilograms, and negotiated a service trade for the remaining two. He purchased truffles from the man a few more times.

The man was part of a vibrant back-alley commerce in truffle sales. Thousands of dollars change hands between chefs and truffle purveyors and hunters, some of whom cart their wares – from the rich earth of Italy, Croatia, France, Spain and even the Fraser Valley – in their own vehicles to a restaurant's back door.

Personal relationships are prized, with some truffle hunters refusing to sell to chefs who disrespect them and their highly valuable product. Chefs prefer to have spent time with the purveyor, and to have time to pore over the produce.

Nothing about a truffle makes sense. It is an ugly, irregular bulb-shaped mushroom that produces a pungent odour as it ripens. When it is ready to release its spores, it uses that scent to lure animals to its subterranean location.

In Europe, and increasingly in the Pacific Northwest, truffles are gathered by a truffle-hunter who works with a specially trained dog. These hunters can either sell their harvests directly to local chefs, or to a broker who takes the truffles to buyers.

Efforts to cultivate the highly prized white "alba" truffle, or tuber magnatum, have not been successful. These truffles, such as the Oregon White Truffle found in British Columbia, are wild.

Truffle hunters keep the exact locations of their finds as secret as a chef may keep a prized recipe.

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"Because they are so sought after, and there is such a strong market for them, they're controlled very, very tightly," said Mr. Richardson, now the executive chef at CinCin in Vancouver.

"To find someone who's just selling them, kinda freelance in a sense, is very, very difficult."

But that is changing.

Brooke Fochuck, a Vancouver-based truffle-hunter, and her dog forage for truffles. John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail

Emiliano Cianfarani and Sahar Chalabiani are Ananda Truffles, a new truffle broker in Vancouver. Mr. Cianfarani's family has for generations gathered white truffles in a small region of Italy and they recently received licensing in Italy's Umbria region to distribute white and black truffles.

"It is basically from a hunter's hand to our hands," Mr. Cianfarani explained, so they know where each truffle comes from.

"The larger brokers cannot tell you were they get their product, or how old it is. We know the type of tree and quality because the hunters provide us with that information."

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The real challenge for the couple is getting their mushrooms in the restaurant door. To do that, they are following the same pattern used by many brokers and truffle hunters. They carry their wares from restaurant to restaurant in the trunk of their car, or a suitcase.

Ms. Chalabiani likes the fussy chefs, the ones who need to smell, touch and pick over truffles to know what will work for them and their customers.

"Purchasing a truffle is personal and requires interaction," she said.

Online, Ananda Truffles sells Perigord black truffles for $70 an ounce. The white alba truffles go for $175 an ounce. But the website is there to promote truffles to non-chefs and caterers. The couple prefers to deal personally with the professionals who use their products, learning a chef's personal tastes and offering them a tactile experience.

The secrecy, conflict and human interaction with the resource is one reason why people can walk into a high-end restaurants with a bag of smelly mushrooms and walk away with cash.

That's how Tyler Gray started.

Mr. Gray started Mikuni Wild Harvest, one of the bigger distributors of truffles in the Vancouver area, to sell foraged matsutake, or pine mushrooms, to Japanese restaurants.

Mr. Gray works with cultivators and hunters in Spain, France, Italy and occasionally Croatia.

"I started by selling wild mushrooms out of the back of a small van in Vancouver," Mr Gray said.

Brooke Fochuk displays a local truffle. John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail

He still has on-the-ground representatives in the city going out daily to clients that include CinCin and Hawksworth, because some chefs need to interact with the produce.

"Some chefs are pretty relaxed. Others will pick through the whole box before purchasing," he said.

Mikuni's white truffles are currently listed online for $322.61 an ounce, but are sold out. The black Perigord truffles go for $120.94 an ounce. As with Ananda, Mr. Gray maintains his preferred method for selling is door-to-door.

"We sell to a number of Michelin-starred chefs, and their customers' expectations drive a great deal of their purchase decisions." They need to see, touch and smell the truffle before they are sure of the ingredients they are purchasing.

"Knowing the person is key," agreed the current chef at Blink in Calgary, Brian Michaels. Any produce he purchases for his kitchen must meet the expectations of his customers. So it is essential that he makes relationships with the people who grow and source the local and high-quality ingredients.

The trend toward locally sourced and produced ingredients, as well as a chef's needs for a personal relationship, has given local truffle hunters with well-trained dogs a boost, though Pacific Northwest truffles still have a distance to go to gain the reputation of some of the better-known European varieties.

Brooke Fochuk is a Vancouver-based truffle hunter who goes out weekly with Dexter, her truffle dog. She knows that local truffles are seen as inferior because of harvesting strategies that can destroy the fruit. She is very careful about how she distributes her truffles.

"If I have surplus truffles, I prefer to take them to a chef that I know will do them justice. I can be snobby about it," Ms. Fochuk said. "If I get an ill response from a chef, then I won't talk to them again because I have more people that want them than I can provide for. That is going to be the case always."

She noted Pacific Northwest truffles have generated a thriving business in Washington State, but the industry is still nascent in British Columbia. Chefs need a consistent supply to include them on a menu, and that isn't possible with local wild truffles.

"There are only two dogs that are really productive in B.C. at this time," she said. Dexter is one of them.

"We are in its infancy in B.C."