Deidre Schipani

Restaurant Critic

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Deidre Schipani has a 26-year career in culinary arts, teaching and writing. For the past 10 years, she has been manager of culinary services for Lunds and Byerly's, a chain of 23 upscale supermarkets in the upper Midwest. She directed the company's School of Culinary Arts, managed retail culinary services and oversaw publications, resource material and a Web site. Schipani was a restaurant critic and food writer for the 70,000-circulation Minnesota Monthly magazine from 1991-96. She wrote a food and wine column for Patuxent Publishing Co., a group of weekly newspapers in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area, from 1981-88. She was a recipe developer for "Prevention's Quick and Healthy Low Fat Cooking: Featuring All American Food" (Rodale Press, 1995) and was the editor, test kitchen manager and food writer for The Byerly Bag, a supermarket publication, from 1997 to 2006. From 1982-86, she owned and operated a full-service catering business in the Baltimore-Washington area. Schipani received a diploma, with honors, in classical French cooking from the L'Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda, Md., in 1982. She has a bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry from Rosemont College in Pennsylvania and master's degree in education, magna cum laude, from Loyola College in Baltimore. She also took courses in restaurant management from Howard Community College in Maryland, attended the International Association of Culinary Professionals Master Class Program and has earned the highest level of certification, Certified Culinary Professional, from the IACP, demonstrating competency in food safety, nutrition, food science and world and U.S. cuisines.