Erin Drain

An amuse bouche on things you should know

  1. The food snob is a respectable, although not incredible, cook. Otherwise she would have no reason to reserve a table at a name-droppable restaurant seven months in advance.
  2. Food snobbery and gourmet are the same thing. Keep on denying it, Pollyanna, but it’s not a crime true.
  3. The food snob is a hypocrite, handing out forcing upon friends and family glowing recommendations on restaurants he has only read about in the forums of chowhound.com.
  4. The food snob broke-ass student of gourmet will charge expensive cuts of meat to a nearly maxed-out credit card and wait a little too long to prepare it because it just looks so pretty on the refrigerator shelf.
  5. People who know food are undeniably cool.

After several years of foregoing the use of chopsticks because of shaky hands and paranoia about early-onset arthritis, I have picked them up again, and now the chili-laden cabbage at Lao Sze Chuan tastes altogether as it should.

It tastes like I am a diner who knows what she’s doing.

I could not tell you when food pretension snuck into my life, but I do know this: the shame of eating pot stickers with an instrument as indelicate as a fork did not come from nowhere. Maybe it was moving to a bigger city, maybe it was just reading all those Times dining and wine articles while neglecting my first-year papers, but to linger over the details of my former ignorance and subsequent enlightenment would only take away from this most important of facts:

Food snobbery is more important than you [think].

Casting aside the obvious biological reasons, we might instead turn to the social. In an America obsessed with trends, most of us will read Vogue and pinch our love handles with remorse for never being able to fit into the Marc Jacobs spring collection. But a purveyor of Gourmet can smile instead, nodding with the certainty that he could “definitely” recreate the braised and herb-encrusted lamb shank with a side of Jerusalem artichokes and microgreens—just as glamorous, not such a blow to the ego. Food is all at once the great leveler and a marker of savoir-faire. So what if she never makes that recipe? The magazines look good lined up on the shelf and chances are you didn’t know what microgreens are anyway. Go look them up. Start practicing your conceited snort. Welcome to gourmet.

Next time, the first course: how to make fast food ironic, and why it’s okay to go through eight bottles of wine a week.