The Visionary Critic

Craig Claiborne, the retired New York Times food editor and restaurant critic who died Saturday, was certainly a man who had been in the right place at the right time. But he was also the right person for the job.

Claiborne took the helm of the New York Times’ food coverage in 1957, just as Americans were becoming curious about cuisine. Rapidly expanding air travel had made trips to Europe affordable for even the middle class. The Kennedys came into office soon after, bringing with them a French chef.

But there were many other restaurant critics and food editors working at the same time. What Claiborne did was to bring to the job a well-rounded culinary education, an indefatigable palate and, most important, a sense of himself as a journalist.

Though previous newspaper restaurant critics had usually been members of the paper’s advertising staff, eating free and writing complimentary things about clients, Claiborne visited restaurants multiple times, always paying his own way and eating anonymously as often as possible.

“He was the Escoffier of American restaurant criticism,” says Phyllis Richman, the dean of restaurant critics after 23 years at the Washington Post. “Escoffier codified and established standards in French cuisine, which is what Claiborne did in restaurant reviewing.

“He established the professional mode of reviewing restaurants and professional standards. On the one hand, he brought the French style of honoring the chef and evaluating restaurants as art, but he also had a very strong consumer viewpoint, which was very American.”

Renowned cooking teacher Jacques Pepin met Claiborne in the late ‘50s through fellow French chef Pierre Franey, Claiborne’s professional partner for most of his career. Pepin was a frequent guest at the fabulous soirees Claiborne held at his East Hampton vacation house--weekend-long parties that served as informal forums for many of the people who would become leaders of America’s developing food culture.

“Before [Claiborne], writing about food was always considered more menial, more home economics,” says Pepin. “He made it much more official, more structured, more literary, with more knowledge.

“He certainly did not do that single-handedly--James Beard and Julia [Child] were very important, of course--but in terms of restaurant criticism, he was the first one.”

Though Claiborne could be a bit of a curmudgeon, he was an important supporter of other food writers. His features in the New York Times launched many a cookbook career, including those of Marcella Hazan, Diana Kennedy and, in the early ‘60s, a just-published author named Julia Child.

“He was not an easy person, not a happy man at all,” says Child. “I was a great friend of Jim Beard’s, and the two didn’t get along at all. But he gave us [co-authors Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck] a wonderful start on the book, really practically a whole column; it was a marvelous review.

“He was very important in the beginnings of the acceptance of food as an art form and a serious discipline. He was there exactly at the right time and he was very thoughtful to the people he wrote about. He launched a lot of people.”