Craig Claiborne

At 79 years old, Craig Claiborne physical status not available right now. We will update Craig Claiborne's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Craig Claiborne (September 4, 1920 – January 22, 2000) was an American restaurant critic, food journalist, and book author.

He was a long-time food editor and restaurant critic for The New York Times and also the author of several cookbooks and an autobiography.

He made many contributions to gastronomy and food writing in the United States throughout his lifetime.

Early life

Claiborne, a native of Sunflower, Mississippi, was raised on the area's unique cuisine in the kitchen of his mother's boarding house in Indianola, Mississippi.

From 1937 to 1939, he participated in pre-service studies at the Mississippi State College. He then moved to the University of Missouri, where he majored in journalism and obtained his B.A. Graduation:

Claiborne served in the United States Navy during World War II and the Korean War. He used his G.I. after finding that his true passion lay in cooking. The École hôtelière de Lausanne (Lausanne Hotel School), which is located in Lausanne, Switzerland, receives a bill.

Personal life

Claiborne was a fixture of the New York City social scene for decades. The lavish, celebrity-studded birthday parties at his East Hampton, New York, estate on eastern Long Island, were a regular feature on the Manhattan social calendar. Despite being out as a gay man to the majority of his acquaintances and coworkers, he had trouble getting to terms with his sexuality. Claiborne's autobiography, A Feast Made for Laughter (1982), he narrated an unusual, almost Faulknerian, childhood and adolescence in small-town Mississippi, where he was mocked by classmates for his meek temperament and dislike of sports, as well as having explicit sexual contact with his own father on at least one occasion. His mother, a warm and amiable Southern lady, was always smiling and generous with her young son. The young Claiborne found solace in the company of his mother's African-American kitchen and housekeeping employees, whose food, humor, and culture he adored.

Claiborne, who suffered with a variety of health problems in his later years, died at age 79 at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York. No reason was given for the death. He bequeathed his estate to The Culinary Institute of America, which is located in Hyde Park, New York, in his will.

Source

Career

Returning to the U.S. from Europe, he worked his way up in the food-publishing business in New York City, New York, as a contributor to Gourmet magazine and a food-product publicist, finally becoming the food editor of The New York Times in 1957. Claiborne was the first man to supervise the food page at a major American newspaper and is credited with broadening The New York Times's coverage of new restaurants and innovative chefs. A typical food section of a newspaper in the 1950s was largely targeted to a female readership and limited to columns on entertaining and cooking for the upscale homemaker. Claiborne brought his knowledge of cuisine and own passion for food to the pages, transforming it into an important cultural and social bellwether for New York City and the nation at large.

Claiborne's columns, reviews and cookbooks introduced a generation of Americans to a variety of ethnic cuisines – particularly Asian and Mexican cuisines – at a time when average Americans had conservative tastes in food, and what little gourmet cooking was available in cities like New York was exclusively French (and, Claiborne observed, not terribly high quality). Looking to hold restaurants accountable for what they served and help the public make informed choices about where to spend their dining dollars, he created the four-star system of rating restaurants still used by The New York Times and which has been widely imitated. Claiborne's reviews were exacting and uncompromising, but he also approached his task as a critic with an open mind and eye for cooking that was different, creative and likely to appeal to his readers.

Inspired by food writers including M. F. K. Fisher, Claiborne also enjoyed documenting his own eating experiences and the discovery of new talent and new culinary trends across the country and across the world. Among the many then-unknown chefs he brought to the public's attention was the New Orleans, Louisiana, chef and restaurateur Paul Prudhomme. At the time, few people outside America's Deep South had any awareness of Louisiana's Cajun culture or its unique culinary traditions.

Along with chef, author and television personality Julia Child, Claiborne has been credited with making the often intimidating world of French and other ethnic cuisine accessible to an American audience and American tastes. Claiborne authored or edited over twenty cookbooks on a wide range of foods and culinary styles, including some of the first best-selling cookbooks dedicated to healthy, low-sodium and low-cholesterol diets. He had a long-time professional relationship and collaborated on many books and projects with the French-born New York City chef, author and television personality Pierre Franey. Claiborne was an advocate of a fad diet known as the Gourmet Diet. With Franey, he worked out two hundred low-sodium, low-cholesterol recipes for this diet.

In 1975, he placed a $300 winning bid at a charity auction for a no-price-limit dinner for two at any restaurant of the winner's choice, sponsored by American Express. Selecting Franey as his dining companion, the two settled on Chez Denis, a noted restaurant located in Paris, France, where they racked up a $4,000 tab on a five-hour, thirty-one-course meal of foie gras, truffles, lobster, caviar and rare wines. When Claiborne later wrote about the experience in his New York Times column, the newspaper received a deluge of reader mail expressing outrage at such an extravagance at a time when so many in the world went without. Even the Vatican and Pope Paul VI criticized it, calling it "scandalous." It was also noted that he and Franey ordered nearly every dish on the menu, but they took only a few bites of each one. Despite its scale and expense, Claiborne gave the meal a mixed review, noting that several dishes fell short in terms of conception, presentation or quality.

Source