The Culinary Institute of America

The red brick complex you can see along the Hudson here is not a liberal arts college. It is the most influential cooking school in the United States, and it began in a converted Connecticut building the year World War Two ended.

In nineteen forty-six, Frances Roth and Katharine Angell opened the New Haven Restaurant Institute in Connecticut to train returning veterans in the culinary trades. The idea was practical: the GI Bill would pay, restaurants needed skilled workers, and veterans needed careers. By nineteen fifty, six hundred graduates from thirty-eight states had passed through. But the school was growing faster than its home could hold it.

In nineteen seventy, the institution, by then called the Culinary Institute of America, purchased a former Jesuit novitiate on eighty acres along the Hudson River in Hyde Park for roughly one million dollars. The five-story stone building was renovated, and the school relocated here in nineteen seventy-two. The Board of Regents of New York State had just granted the school authority to award an Associate in Occupational Studies degree, making it the first culinary college in the country to confer that credential. Bachelor's degrees followed in nineteen ninety-three.

What the school became is almost impossible to overstate. Julia Child, who was not herself a student here, said that in practically every successful restaurant or hotel she had visited in the country, she encountered a Culinary Institute graduate in a leadership position. Among those graduates is Anthony Bourdain, class of nineteen seventy-eight, who went on to write Kitchen Confidential and change the way a generation understood professional cooking and global food culture.

Today the campus operates five public restaurants staffed by students, trains roughly two thousand eight hundred students at a time, and sends graduates into Michelin-starred kitchens on every continent. The building looks like a seminary because it was one. What happens inside it is a different kind of vocation: teaching people who will feed the world.