A Tale of Two Thanksgivings : Affluence: Gourmet markets are filled with customers who want it their way. For many buyers, the cost is not a factor.

Just mention Thanksgiving Eve, and Frank Vallelunga squeezes his eyes shut and ducks for cover.

“This is the worst day of the year for me,” he said apologetically. “I get the brunt of it when people don’t get what they want.”

In a city where being a member of the culinary avant-garde can be as telling as driving the right car, the scene was replayed again and again on Wednesday at the area’s gourmet markets.

Vallelunga runs the meat department at the upscale Irvine Ranch Farmers Market in West Los Angeles, and he had a bit of a crisis on his hands. He had ordered 1,000 turkeys but came up short on the 30-pound Diestel range-grown variety--the kind, the marketing brochure boasts, fed with fine grains and clear mountain water on a ranch nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Vallelunga needed 14 more turkeys and he needed them fast. Thanksgiving comes just once a year, and the well-to-do-health-conscious-environmentally-aware Westsiders who frequent his meat counter often have fuses more suited to the Fourth of July.

“You get phone orders for a 20-pound turkey, and they call back and say they are having more guests and now need 30 pounds,” said Vallelunga, whose supplier found enough 27-pound Shelton range-grown turkeys to bail him out. “This is a bad day for me.”

Not that Vallelunga doesn’t go the extra mile for his customers. One woman ordered fresh alligator to serve at a “New Orleans style” Thanksgiving, and Vallelunga--a self-described steak man who confesses an ignorance of reptiles--obliged, for $13.99 a pound. He also served up several venison steaks, 20 quails, eight geese and four ducks.

“Things are more expensive here, but I will sacrifice on all sorts of things, but not on foods,” said Martin Lewis, a free-lance humorist and amateur chef whose groceries included duck mousse pate ($59.99 per pound), a 16-pound range-grown turkey (“I prefer a kinder, gentler turkey”) and red currant jelly (“no one ever eats the cranberry sauce”).

Down the aisle, a woman in black sweats who identified herself as Vicki was stacking packages of fresh croutons into a grocery cart. Charged with preparing the dressing for her mother’s Thanksgiving turkey, the free-lance film producer decided to splurge and buy the freshest--and most expensive--ingredients she could find.

Vons wouldn’t do. Neither would Ralphs, Lucky or Alpha Beta, she said. Buying groceries at the Irvine Ranch market made the sort of statement a film producer should make.

“But I am always afraid of running into somebody I know when I don’t have any makeup on,” she said.

Across town at the equally upscale Bristol Farms market in South Pasadena, Don Roberts was directing a crew of eight attendants as a fashion-show procession of cars glided off Fair Oaks Avenue into a cramped parking lot near the Pasadena Freeway.

Roberts had the unenviable task of squeezing 3,000 cars into the 150-space lot over the course of the day. At a market where shoppers regard their Volvos, Audis, BMWs, Mercedes and Saabs as their extended family, it was no routine undertaking.

“What do you mean, I can’t park here?” one irritated driver snorted.

“It will just be a moment, sir,” advised an attendant clad in the store’s hallmark red-and-white checked shirt.

Inside, a swarm of men and women converged on the bakery counter, grabbing numbers from an automatic dispenser and shouting their orders for pumpkin muffins and Parker House rolls over the clamor of others jockeying for a free cup of “mocha java dark.” Around the corner, a tray of complimentary turkey sushi quieted some in the crowd.

A special counter was set up for the hundreds of advance orders for bread and pies, and clerks unloaded more than 1,800 fresh turkeys--most of them range grown--from trucks at a rear loading dock. Grocery carts brimmed with fresh Eastern oysters, swordfish sausage, salmon mousse pate and gourmet coffee beans.

Judy McCarron, who left her Beverly Hills home at 7:15 a.m. to be at the South Pasadena market when it opened at 8, was one of the unlucky shoppers who did not make the Monday deadline for advance orders. She had to wait an hour to buy several loaves of white bread for her turkey stuffing.

“It was worth it,” she said. “The stuff you get in the cellophane wrappers isn’t real bread.”