WESTSIDER CRAIG CLAIBORNE
Food editor of the New York Times
3-10-79
"To be a good restaurant critic, you shouldn't have a conscience," says Craig Claiborne, food editor of the New York Times. "I used to visit restaurants twice a day, frequently seven days a week, and lie awake brooding about whether my reviews were honest — whether I was hurting somebody who didn't deserve to be hurt."
Recognized throughout the United States as the father of modern restaurant criticism, Claiborne joined the Times in 1957, and shortly thereafter was given the go-ahead to write reviews based on a four-star system. "The New York Times made the decision. I was the instrument. It was the first newspaper that allowed a restaurant critic to say anything he wanted. It took a lot of guts, when a newspaper depends on advertising."
A 58-year-old bachelor whose soft voice still carries strong traces of his native Mississippi, Claiborne has few of the characteristics generally imagined of a Timesman. He is a true bon vivant, and does not appear to take himself or his work too seriously. He prefers to be called by his first name, is not a particularly fashionable dresser, and spends as little time as possible in Manhattan. In his lighter moods, such as that in which I find him on the day of our interview, he delights in telling jokes that are classics of schoolyard humor. The punch line, more often than not, is drowned by his own uproarious laughter.
Although he has maintained a Westside apartment for the past nine years, Claiborne spends most of his time at his house in East Hampton, Long Island, next door to Pierre Franey, one of the greatest French chefs in America, who, since 1974, has co-authored Claiborne's food articles for the New York Times Sunday magazine. Recently he purchased a larger, more modern house about 15 minutes from Franey, which he plans to occupy shortly. The pair cook together about five times a week. Claiborne calls the house "my Taj Mahal — my Xanadu."
He explains his jovial mood by saying that the night before, he attended a big dinner party for restaurateur Joe Baum at the Four Seasons. "It was an everybody-bring-something dinner. Jim Beard brought bread. I brought saviche (marinated raw fish), and Gael Greene brought some chocolate dessert. I got roaring drunk."
In spite of his earthiness, Claiborne unquestionably ranks as one of the leading food authorities of his time. His articles, which appear in the Times each Monday, Wednesday and Sunday, cover every subject from the particulars of a dinner for Chinese Vice-Premier Teng Hsiao-ping in Washington (where Claiborne saw a rock group he had never heard of called the Osmonds) to the six most creative ways of preparing scallops. He has written numerous best-selling cookbooks, and he often travels around the world on fact-finding missions.
Claiborne's rise from obscurity to the most prestigious food job in America astonished no one more than himself, since his principal qualifications were a B.A. in journalism and one year's training at a hotel and restaurant school in Switzerland. However, the Times knew exactly what they were looking for when Jane Nickerson retired in 1957, and Claiborne quickly proved to be the man of the hour. He threw himself into his work with boundless energy, writing no less than five columns a week, but his relationship with the newspaper eventually became a love hate affair. "Things came to the point where I couldn't go to a restaurant at night unless I came home here and had at least four Scotch and sodas and four martinis. And at this point, I took myself off to Africa. I stayed at the Stanley Hotel in Kenya, and I came back and said, 'Give me my benefits. I'm quitting this place.' They thought I was kidding."
He wasn't. Claiborne left the paper for almost two years. "Then the Times came to me and said, 'Would you come back under any circumstances?' And I must confess that I felt a great emotional relief." He agreed to return if the paper would have someone else do the local restaurant reviews; he also requested that his neighbor and cooking partner Pierre Franey share the Sunday byline. The conditions were immediately met.
Claiborne's Westside apartment is painted green from floor to ceiling — thus fulfilling an old fantasy of his. He describes the apartment itself as "gently shabby," but says that the building, constructed in 1883, is "the greatest residency in the entire island of Manhattan. You're catty-corner from Carnegie Hall, you're six minutes by foot from Lincoln Center, you can walk to any place on Broadway within seconds, and there are very few restaurants you couldn't get to within five minutes of this place." His favorite restaurant in all of Manhattan is the Shun Lee Palace (155 E. 55th St.), while two other favorites on the West Side are the Russian Tea Room and the Fuji Restaurant (238 W. 56th).
Asked about other interests or hobbies, Claiborne smiles mischievously and replies: "I'm having a $6000 Bolton stereo system put into my new Xanadu. You can clap your hands and change the tapes or records. I love music and sex and food, and outside of that, forget it!"