num_pages: 320
description: From the bestselling author of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse comes the first biography of the father of the American food revolution who introduced the world to the likes of Julia Child Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters. From his first day on the job as the New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne excited readers by introducing them to food worlds unknown from initiating them in the standards of the finest French cuisine and the tantalizing joys of the then mostly unknown foods of India China Mexico Spain to extolling the pleasures of exotic ingredients like arugula and praising newfangled tools like the Cuisinart which once hed given his stamp of approval became wildly popular. A good review of a restaurant guaranteed a full house for weeks while a bad review might close a kitchen down. Based on unprecedented access to Claibornes personal papers and interviews with a host of food world royalty including Jacques Pepin Gael Greene and Alice Waters Tom McNamee offers a lively and vivid account of Claibornes extraordinary adventure in food from his own awakening in the bistros of Paris to his legendary wine-soaked dinner parties to his travels to colorful locals from Morocco to Saigon and the infamous $4000 dinner he shared in Paris with French chef Pierre Franey that made front-page news. More than an engrossing biography this is the story of the countrys transition from enchantment with frozen TV dinners to a new consciousness of truly good cooking.
language: None
title: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance: The Turbulent Life and Fine Times of the Man Who Changed the Way We Eat
publisher: Free Press