Go Ahead, Be a Snob! By Liya Cui

This was a while ago. I’m serving a family of four at work. The mom orders a glass of red wine, and I pour her a taste, as we always do. She takes the sip, puts the glass down, and says, “No.”

Her adult children, mortified, scold her in hushed tones. Their mother is being difficult in a restaurant, and what’s more humiliating than that? But I respect the rejection, which I hear so rarely. Her kids think I’m annoyed at having to do more work, but I actually want her to find a wine she enjoys, and I’ll keep pouring until she does (she liked the second one).

I like people who are knowledgeable about food and drink, and that inevitably leads them to have high standards for what they consume. These people tend to find work that lets them nerd out about the culinary arts, and they’re the people I’ve learned so much from over the years in restaurants and food media. 

Many of these people are also what you might call “snobs.” A chef who threw away the out-of-season cucumbers in her lunch because “they tasted like dirt.” A sommelier grumbling about a “mousy” wine, a flaw my unsophisticated palate couldn’t detect. A food journalist with a favorite producer of heritage Berkshire bacon that she could identify by taste alone. 

I get that people don’t like snobs, especially in this age of ambivalence. Snobbery is about caring too much and trying too hard when the norm is being cool, chill, and downplaying your wants/needs/dreams lest you face rejection. The problem is that snobs can be judgmental, and that gets especially dicey when it comes to food. The way we eat is an extremely personal choice, wrapped up in all these feelings about culture, upbringing, and our bodies. People tend to be sensitive about it. But the food snobs I know will let you enjoy your junk food and sugary cocktails in peace—they like those things too, sometimes. 

Food snobs simply know something that you don’t. That life is too short to drink bad wine and eat out-of-season cucumbers. They embody a certain wisdom and take it with them to the restaurant, the dinner party, the farmer’s market, and their lives are enriched because of it. 

A bartender I worked for said she got into the craft of drink-making when she realized she could travel the world from one well-stocked bar. In the mood for whiskey? Do you want a sweeter bourbon from Kentucky or a smoky scotch from Scotland? How about a finely-tuned Japanese whiskey? Or a rum from the sugarcane fields of the Caribbean? Want to follow that with some Chartreuse made by Carthusian monks in the French Alps? Most of us with modest means won’t find our way to many places in one lifetime, but you can go adventuring at your local cocktail bar and have a fully realized sensory experience.

Food snobs achieve this by slowing down and savoring. They take the time to learn where their food and drink are coming from and pay attention to what’s happening to their senses. The journalist who was picky about her bacon was also so obsessed with chocolate that she judged chocolate competitions. This is how chocolate judges judge chocolate: They let a piece sit on their tongue until it reaches the same temperature as the inside of their mouth. Then they slowly move it around and let it melt, releasing the full aroma and flavor.

I usually have a nice bar of dark chocolate on hand, and I always eat it like this. If I close my eyes and let myself free associate, all of a sudden, I’m not tasting chocolate anymore. I taste the bark on the cocoa tree, the wet dirt that feeds its roots. I’d rather not do this with, say, a Hershey’s bar because those complex notes get drowned out by the unrelenting force of pure sugar. Maybe my penchant for fancy chocolate is snobby, but that’s just the way it is. 

If you look deeper this way, you’ll learn that food snobs are really just nature lovers. Consider the way that wine geeks talk about terroir, the environmental factors that affect the taste of a grape. Wines grown in hot, dry climates are big, robust, and have higher alcohol content. Wines grown in cold climates at high elevation are more delicate, refined, and acidic. Ask a sommelier about their favorite grapes, and they’ll start talking about sand, volcanic ash, mountains, and lakes.

Everything we eat and drink has to grow from some part of the planet, and through a magical cellular transformation, it’s imbued with the qualities of its surroundings. You can recognize them the way food snobs do; you just have to care. Then concentrate.

Head to the farmer’s market and get a jar of local honey; it’ll taste like the wildflowers of your home. Pop a peak-summer cherry tomato in your mouth, and it’ll taste like the sun. The blueberries I get from a farm in the Catskills taste like clear mountain water. It’s a romantic way of living, to take a bite out of the world. I can spend all day at the beach, listening to the waves and smelling salt in the air, but the only way to taste the feeling of being by the seaside is to have a briny oyster. 

I was pretty clueless about wine until I started working at a wine bar. Another server gave me an impromptu lesson during a slow start to the dinner shift. We tasted Albamar, a white wine produced by a small Spanish winery of the same name. He told me the Albariño grapes are grown on the edge of the Galician coast in northwestern Spain, so close that the waves sprayed ocean mist onto the grapes. You can taste it, literally. That refreshing salinity in the wine.

It finally clicked what he and others like him were so gripped by. I was there, at once standing in a little bar in Brooklyn and on the coast of Spain, sipping this delicious wine and happily coming to the acceptance that I’m a snob too.