Visiting the CIA 🙂
When we were visiting the Huguenot homes in New Paltz, the fellow whom we met there suggested that, on our way home from New York City, we should stop in at the CIA north of Poughkeepsie and check out their Apple Pie Bakery Cafe. Seemed a bit funny to learn that the CIA had a bakery cafe open to the public but who am I to argue about apple pie advice. :-).
It turns out that, in this instance, the CIA was the Culinary Institute of America which offers a four year program for budding chefs hoping to land employment in five star restaurants and hotels. Not sure how many are successful in achieving that goal but it is apparently one reason to want to spend four years in a culinary school.
The campus is beautifully located with the main building featuring a broad, open plaza called the Anton Plaza, actually the roof of an enclosed garage, providing wonderful views of the valley. (Location)
For those who like to eat food rather than make food, there are a number of restaurants on site where the students do the making and the serving as part of their preparation for real-world experiences. The Apple Pie Bakery Cafe is the least formal of these and the only one that doesn’t require a reservation s0 we stood in line-up in the hallway for a while and enjoyed the experience. Lots of interesting creations from the bakery to tempt and surprise.
As mentioned, our timing wasn’t the best so we had to stand in line to get into the cafe but once we did we found the food choices to be interestingly different and certainly tasty. Glass windows from the hallway let you ‘inspect’ the bakery section. I was a Federal Food and Drug Inspector in the 70’s so seeing everyone dressed in white and all of that flour brought back memories of those days when I inspected a different bakery every day.
