Hyde Park, N.Y. -- The campus is green, spacious and leafy. The buildings are stately. The atmosphere is calm and subdued.
Looks like your average bucolic college environment.
But the students carry knives, and the smart visitor sidles up to an exhaust fan when walking the grounds. The aromas coming from the teaching buildings are the fumes of heaven.
This is the main campus of the Culinary Institute of America, the other CIA, 90 miles north of New York City. At any given moment, 2,800 students from around the globe are enrolled in two and four-year degree programs in either culinary arts or baking and pastry arts. They are the chefs of the future at high profile Manhattan eateries and hometown bistros.
The public doesn't have to wait until they graduate and become established to interact with them. Five student-staffed restaurants feed customers under the watchful eyes of CIA management, and visitors are also invited to take tours and shop at a bookstore. Just about anyone who eats would find fun here.
The Culinary Institute of America was founded in 1946 as a school to provide skills to servicemen and women who were returning to civilian life after World War II. Originally based in New Haven Conn., the CIA purchased the Jesuit priest novitiate St. Andrew-on-Hudson in 1972 to accommodate its growing operations and student body.
Vestiges of the campus' religious origins, which date back to 1903, can still be seen in the CIA's main building, Roth Hall. A chapel has been converted to the student dining hall, but the glowing stained glass windows remain, along with other small signs of the previous owner.
Since moving here, the non-profit CIA has opened satellite campuses in the Napa Valley, San Antonio and Singapore. In Hyde Park, three out of four pupils are in the culinary (cooking) curriculum. Slightly more than half of the student body is male.
The CIA also offers a broad variety of short programs for established professionals and hobbyists.
Forty-one kitchens and bakeshops and a library of more than 80,000 volumes are among the resources used by those enrolled here. The school grounds are home to four residence halls, six residence lodges and a gym.
The institute's bookshop is focused more on merchandise for the public than on traditional academic materials. Riedel glassware and CIA-branded kitchen paraphernalia such as prep bowls, loaf pans and fluted cutters are on sale along with school hoodies, baseball caps and T-shirts.
Five public dining options differ on the hours and days they are open, and they range from the French Escoffier Restaurant and the Italian Ristorante Caterina de' Medici to the local and sustainable food-focused St. Andrew's Cafe and the casual Apple Pie Bakery Cafe. Reservations are recommended for all but the bakery cafe.
We had a memorable dinner at the Caterina de' Medici, an attractive space in the design of a Tuscan villa featuring a two-story main dining room. Roasted calamari with aromatic bread crumbs appetizer ($9), a baked pasta roll with spinach and ricotta cheese ($15) and fresh pasta with tomato fish sauce ($16) were all exquisite. The calamari was served in small filets rather than the usual rings.
All of the food was prepared and served by CIA sophomores. Our waiter, though sweet, had the personality of someone who will spend his career in the kitchen, away from the public. Service was not doting.
However, maitre d' instructor Charles A. Garibaldi, himself a CIA graduate, was particularly helpful in guiding us through the lengthy wine list.
Business casual attire is recommended at all but Apple Pie Bakery Cafe. The campus and its restaurants will be closed from July 8 through the end of the month.
Damien has been around so long, he was at Summerfest the night George Carlin was arrested for speaking the seven dirty words you can't say on TV. He was also at the Uptown Theatre the night Bruce Springsteen's first Milwaukee concert was interrupted for three hours by a bomb scare. Damien was reviewing the concert for the Milwaukee Journal. He wrote for the Journal and Journal Sentinel for 37 years, the last 29 as theater critic.
During those years, Damien served two terms on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, a term on the board of the association's foundation, and he studied the Latinization of American culture in a University of Southern California fellowship program. Damien also hosted his own arts radio program, "Milwaukee Presents with Damien Jaques," on WHAD for eight years.
Travel, books and, not surprisingly, theater top the list of Damien's interests. A news junkie, he is particularly plugged into politics and international affairs, but he also closely follows the Brewers, Packers and Marquette baskeball. Damien lives downtown, within easy walking distance of most of the theaters he attends.
