An epicure is a person with refined taste in food and wine. That is what the English word means, and it is very nearly the opposite of what Epicurus taught.

In the Letter to Menoeceus, in Robert Drew Hicks's translation, he writes: “Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet … while bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips.” He also disowned the caricature in advance, in a sentence that reads like he'd already met his own reputation: “It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of merrymaking, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life.”

The reason is structural rather than puritanical. Epicurus defined the goal as the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance — which means there is a ceiling. Once the pain of hunger is gone, there's nowhere further up to go, and a more elaborate meal adds nothing except new dependencies to be anxious about. Luxury, on his account, increases agitation. His strategy is preserved in one line: if you wish to make Pythocles wealthy, don't give him more money — reduce his desires.

The caricature does describe someone. It describes the Cyrenaics, a rival school of hedonists who really did prioritise immediate bodily pleasure, and whom Epicurus argued against. Two and a half thousand years later, their position is walking around wearing his name.

For Epicurus himself, and his argument that death is nothing to us, see Epicurus in the Philosophy world.