Determined Daniel Boulud fans gave a $50,000 gift to Citymeals late last week for two seats at his sold out benefit Sunday. The room with its prime $25,000 tables was reconfigured to make space. Next day it had to be reorganized again to make room for Mayor Bloomberg and his significant other, Diana Taylor.  It was the biggest crowd ever at the chef’s annual benefit, Burgundy, Bordeux, Black Truffles & Blue Jeans. With an auction of sybaritic travel and coddling run by Charlie Rose – his first ever – the evening raised more than $700,000 to help feed the city’s homebound elderly shutins. A table for eight at Rao’s went for $17,000.  “The total is twice as much as last year,” Boulud exaulted as a few dozen cooks filed in to take a bow. Gerald Passedat, from Le Petit Nice in Marseille, France, to cook the fish course and dessert, said he was astonished to see the event.  “In France, we don’t do anything like this.” At home he is concerned about the frailties of his aging mother, he said.

         Mayor Bloomberg – in a soft coral sweater zipped open at the neck over a blue and white striped button down shirt, also open, and the specified blue jeans – confessed his usual Sunday dinner was Shake‘n’Bake chicken or hot dogs, though he did buy a table for opening night of Daniel’s new DBSud.  He pronounced Boulud a classic New Yorker, “interested in capitalism and philanthrophy.”

        Daniel’s sea scallop rosette on celery mousseline with a brown butter sauce and black winter truffles had a wonderful retro scent – that cream, those truffles. Passédat’s line-caught sea bass was really rare, the way I like it, but some were shocked. “It was supposed to be lukewarm,” Daniel said in defense. With the poularde and caramelized chestnuts under fluttering brussels sprout leaves, a stunning Chateau LaTour, 2000, was poured.  My first LaTour in decades. Two seats away the owner’s daughter, Florence Rogers-Pinault sipped as if it were an everyday red.

         As The Wall Street Journal’s saucy Marshall Heyman reported, Jean Francois Bruel, Daniel’s executive chef, said the kitchen had slivered and grated 13 pounds of truffles, donated at cost by the restaurant’s truffle purveyer though normally $850 a pound.

         “The smell of truffles in a pheromone,” Drew Nieporent announced.  “Did you know Wolfgang Puck used to go around with a truffle in his pocket to attract women?”

        “Are you sure it wasn’t a zucchini?” the Four Seasons’ Julian Niccolini responded. At that point the  ”Immaculate White Vacherin” dessert of Passédat seemed smartly modest.

Photographs by Star Black.

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