The Faux Connoisseurs : If you want to see a restaurateur cringe, ask him about the dreaded food snob

Rising food costs, nasty restaurant reviews and competition from the guy down the street aren’t all that restaurateurs worry about these days.

If you really want to see restaurant owners cringe, ask them about food snobs. Not to be confused with a connoisseur-- described by Webster’s as “a person who has expert knowledge and keen discrimination in some field, especially in the field of fine arts or in matters of taste”--the food snob is merely picky, with neither expert knowledge nor keen taste. These faux connoisseurs roam from one hot restaurant to the next wreaking havoc (well, maybe just a whole lot of frustration) among this town’s best chefs and restaurateurs.

“These are people who like big, awkward wines, vinegar sauces and hot spicy stuff,” La Toque’s Ken Frank says. “They tend not to appreciate more subtle dishes and are rarely into oysters. They only like new and exciting dishes and they almost always claim to be friends of Bradley Odgen’s.”

They also typically claim to be experts in at least one, usually several, areas of food or wine and they’re always looking to outwit the chef. “I had a group tell me, ‘I know this isn’t lotte you’ve served,’ ” says Champagne’s Patrick Healy. “They insisted it was sole and returned the dish. My response was to take it off the bill, I mean, you can’t change their minds.”

At least not every time--there was one occasion in which Healy got silent but sweet satisfaction. “This guy came in and said he’d eaten wild game, even hunted it, all over the world,” Healy says, “a real expert. He insisted that what I’d served him could not possibly be wild duck and then offered to bring in his own duck and show me all about wild game. But he said all this before he finished eating and one of the waiters happened to go by his table just as he bit into a piece of buckshot. The waiter saw him take it out of his mouth and discreetly put it on his bread plate.” Needless to say, the man did not complain. “I’m sure that silenced him for a while,” Healy laughed.

“People can become really obnoxious,” restaurateur Michael McCarty says. “There’s the cliched person who says, ‘This isn’t lamb,’ and you say, ‘Oh really, what is it then?’ We’re lucky though, it doesn’t happen too often here (at Michael’s).”

McCarty might claim he rarely encounters food snobs (showing a bit of elitism himself, he says that his restaurant attracts a “higher level” of customer), but Michael’s, with its reputation as one of this city’s most important restaurants (with important prices to match), is exactly the sort of place the food snob seeks out. Where the true connoisseur might find equal pleasure in, say, a roadside vegetable stand with perfect tomatoes and Michael’s, the faux connoisseur drives right by the tomatoes--unless, of course, the vegetable stand has been praised in a glossy food magazine.

“When food snobs are confronted with the simplicity of our dishes (at Angeli), they don’t know what to do--there aren’t 20 things on the plate for them to play with,” says Angeli chef Evan Kleiman. “And then, once they see that we do home-style food, they always think they can cook everything we do better themselves.”

Usually, they can’t. “We had a guy--a real foodie--who used to come into the City Cafe (now Border Grill) and would go on and on about what a great cook he was,” City’s Susan Feniger says. “So one day he decided to treat us to a sample of his cooking. He made king prawns in lime Jell-O--made from scratch, of course. We tried to look interested, but not too interested.”

Mostly though, chefs and restaurateurs have to shrug off the snobs. “I used to put my ego on every plate,” Trumps’ Michael Roberts says. “But I’ve sort of given up. I think my reputation is serious enough now that I won’t be held responsible if somebody wants to put something disgusting like cocktail sauce on the smoked chicken salad.”

“You always have to take complaints seriously,” Feniger says. “Sometimes the customers are definitely right, and even if they’re not . . . well, it’s their money.”

Yet there is a limit on how far you can push a chef or restaurateur--even at Piero Selvaggio’s Valentino, which is famous for its service. (“The customer is king,” Selvaggio says.) “One woman--we called her the lady of the overcooked pasta--kept coming in and insisted on getting overdone vermicelli,” Selvaggio says. “And the pasta would be like mush, I mean really, like mashed potatoes, but she’d always send it back saying, ‘It’s too raw for me.’ Finally, the chefs rebelled and refused to serve it to her.”

Sometimes people make innocent mistakes--like the man who wanted syrup on his poona pancakes at City (the dish is closer to potato pancakes than to flapjacks), or the couple at Duplex who ordered a wine with “no character” (“They didn’t want it too sweet or too fruity,” chef Mark Carter explains), or the person who went into a tirade at a Spago buffet when he saw hard-boiled quail eggs on the table and thought someone said they were whale eggs. “Yuk, what a horrible thing to do,” the man went on and on (according to chef Mark Peel), “and I always thought they were mammals.”

It’s not always easy to keep from correcting such mistakes, especially when committed by food snobs. Citrus’ Michel Richard remembers overhearing a man commenting loudly that a dish Richard had made was not right. “He went on about how he had it in France,” Richard says. “But it was my creation, my recipe, how could I make my own dish wrong?”

“Some of the most pompous food snobs I have ever met make some of the biggest mistakes,” Ken Frank says, “and that’s when I really cringe. One table kept going on about the delicious mesquite flavor in a fish I’d served. We don’t use mesquite, but I just stood there and smiled. You can’t deflate a person’s balloon, especially in front of his friends.

“True gastronomes are not necessarily wealthy and they aren’t pretentious,” Frank adds. “They love to eat and they have souls. My favorite customers are those who know enough to be comfortable and don’t immediately try to impress.”

Nothing makes a chef happier than a customer with an open mind. “You can’t go in asking a restaurant to change,” St. Estephe’s John Sedlar says. “You have to let a restaurant do what a restaurant does best.”

What Valentino does best is the personalized meal, presided over by Selvaggio himself. But not everybody accepts his guidance. “I’d just come back from the airport with a shipment of fresh truffles,” he says. “And sure enough, Mr. X, who is president of a very big corporation, comes in with a very special New Yorker, a New Yorker who owns a very good restaurant and knows everything about food. And the corporate president says, ‘Please impress us,’ and of course I am very proud and say, ‘You are very lucky, we can make you a whole lunch based on truffles.’ And so the very profound connoisseurs look at each other and the New Yorker, the one who is supposed to be the real connoisseur, says in a very deep voice, ‘I’m sorry, we’re not into fish today.’ ”