By Emily Wilson and Gennady Sheyner

Molly wants to know where she can get an éclair like one she had in Paris. Hungry G is hungry for Panamanian food, and Starving has a hankering for oxtail stew.

Fortunately, these food lovers can satisfy their cravings on the Web at Chowhound.com.

The site has been connecting people to food and to others with similar passions since 1997. On New York message boards titled “The Best,” “Manhattan,” “Outer Boroughs,” “What’s my Craving?” and “Tri-State area,” posters have lively conversations about where to get the most delicious spleen sandwich, Turkish food, and jelly donuts. The site isn’t only for finding Georgian or Jamaican food – chowhounds also want to know where to get anise seeds, how to get a reservation at Mario Batali’s popular Babbo, or where in Brooklyn is good for a retirement dinner for 40.

“It’s a collection of discussions about food that is split both regionally and by general topics and that has more info than you can ever want about everything, from Popeye’s chicken to random Vietnamese sandwich places," said Jonathan Saw, who visits the site every day.

Chowhounds are different from “foodies,” says Chowhound founder Jim Leff, who is `known on the Web site as Alpha Dog. Foodies, he says, follow trends, usually with their Zagat guides firmly in hand, but chowhounds just want every bite to be intensely delicious. And Leff, a professional restaurant critic and trombonist, wanted to do something to help facilitate that. Leff says he wants to go to places where people put their heart and soul into the food, not a bleak restaurant landscape of fast food joints with an occasional Red Lobster or Olive Garden.

“Chowhound is the antidote to that,” Leff said. “We’re saying, ‘Don’t listen to marketing, don’t listen to hype.’ Make all your occasions special occasions.”

Regular poster Peter Flom says the site helps him do just that.

“Chowhound tries to be not just about the restaurants that are popular, trendy, well-lit and where people speak English,” he said. “They also pride themselves on finding little out-of-the-way places in Chinatown that Zagat wouldn’t mention. Recently, for example, the site held a discussion about Japanese noodle shops in New York. And some of these restaurants only seat about five people, so they would never have enough visitors to have an opportunity to be mentioned in Zagat, which is done by popularity and votes.”

No wonder chowhounds like Casa Adela, a site-recommended Puerto Rican place on Avenue C, where the customers all seem to know each other and to be enjoying their mondongo (tripe soup) and pernil (roast pork). On a recent Friday night, one group was celebrating a birthday with a big cake covered in white frosting and strawberries, while the owner Adela Fargas sat at a corner table with her son and daughter, Luis and Abby Rivera.

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