Craig Claiborne; Influential Food Writer, Restaurant Critic

Craig Claiborne, who in a three-decade career as food editor and restaurant critic for the New York Times was one of the most influential culinary writers in America, has died.

The 79-year-old Claiborne died Saturday at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York. No cause of death was announced.

Once called the man who “single-handedly invented honest restaurant criticism,” Claiborne was responsible in large measure for an American mania for food that developed over the last half of the 20th Century. Until his retirement in 1988, Claiborne took readers around the world, discovering ingredients and recipes and making them accessible to home cooks.

As a food writer, he was largely instrumental in turning budding chefs into stars. He would invite up-and-coming chefs to his vacation home on Long Island and ask them to prepare a meal for him and his guests. Claiborne would then write profiles of the chefs and describe the meal in a way that would bring enormous attention to the restaurant where the chef worked. Claiborne was responsible for turning the attention of the restaurant crowd away from the owner or the maitre d’ and placing it upon the person who ran the kitchen.

“His contributions place him alongside only James Beard and Julia Child in terms of importance,” said Russ Parsons, the food editor of the Los Angeles Times. “It’s impossible to overstate his impact on today’s food scene.

“Before Claiborne, newspaper restaurant critics were usually members of the advertising department who ate for free and then wrote only complimentary things. Food sections were largely lifeless collections of homemaker recipes, prominently featuring both stories and ingredients that were canned.”

With a formal education in food, which he received at the Swiss Hotelkeepers Assn. school in Lausanne, Switzerland, Claiborne joined the New York Times as food editor in 1957.

He brought with him a wide-ranging and critical palate that appreciated classic French food--as well as a hot dog or deli sandwich.

And he arrived as a time when America was looking outward, thanks in part to the romance of the Kennedy administration’s “new frontier,” which ushered in a new interest in high culture. That culture included food, mostly French, which Claiborne knew well from his days at the Swiss cooking school.

He also wrote at a time when more and more Americans were dining out. The rising interest in restaurants and food helped populate the nation’s newspapers with restaurant critics, many of whom tried to emulate Claiborne.

Claiborne was born in Sunflower, Miss., a rural Delta town. His mother was, as Gay Talese has noted in “The Kingdom and the Power,” his book about the New York Times, “a veritable Southern belle” and “a fantastic cook,” whose culinary skill was once celebrated in an article in Liberty magazine.

As a child, Claiborne stayed close to the kitchen and watched his mother prepare dishes for which the South is famous, such as biscuits, fried chicken, greens and some Creole dishes. Years later, in his book, “Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking,” he noted that “nothing can equal the universal appeal of the food of one’s childhood and early youth.”

After graduating from the University of Missouri with a journalism degree, Claiborne served in the Navy during World War II. He once told an interviewer for Look magazine that he was “a psychological mess” after the war.

“Nothing meant anything to me,” he said. “I only knew that I liked to cook and I liked to write.”

He held a number of public relations jobs after the war, served again in the Navy during the Korean War, and by 1953 decided to attend cooking school in Switzerland on the GI Bill. He supplemented his government check with money earned as a bartender and waiter. Out of a class of 60 students, he finished sixth in the service course and eighth in the cooking course.

Upon his return to the United States, Claiborne found a job as a bartender. He entered food journalism as a receptionist, at Gourmet magazine, but soon worked his way up to an editorial position.

In 1957, Jane Nickerson, then the food editor of the New York Times, resigned from her job. She recommended Claiborne for the position and he was hired after one interview.

He published his first book, “The New York Times Cookbook,” four years later and the book became one of the most influential in American kitchens, selling nearly 3 million copies.

He went on to write 20 books, including the autobiography “A Feast Made for Laughter.” In 1990, he revised and updated “The New York Times Cookbook” to take into account the changes in the way Americans ate during his tenure as an influential food writer.

While at the Times, Claiborne placed great importance on dining out and made a name for himself reviewing restaurants. He began publishing a restaurant rating system in the Times--four stars for superb, no stars for the not so superb. Soon the headwaiters of the top restaurants in the city were on the lookout for him, using secretly obtained photographs.

But Claiborne, had the distinction of not looking very distinctive. A lifelong bachelor, he was neither tall nor short, thin nor fat. He would make reservations in an assumed name and often arrive with a party of four or six. Claiborne would often order for all of his guests and then sample a bit off each plate. That way he could gain the perspective on the menu and maintain a reasonable weight.

Perhaps his most famous meal was shared with just one person, his longtime collaborator Pierre Franey, in November 1975 at Chez Denis in Paris. The tab: $4,000.

The pair had bid $300 in a public television fund-raising auction for the prize, donated by American Express, for dinner for two anywhere at any price. They shared nine wines, including an 1835 Madeira, to accompany 31 dishes, sensuously described in a front-page New York Times story.

‘It’s a shame the public’s memory is so short,” Parsons said Sunday. “But every time we rely on a restaurant critic for advice on where to eat or we look to the newspaper for stylish and diverse cooking, we should remember that he was there first.”