The tartiflette, a gratin of potatoes, bacon and cheese, at Bocuse...

The tartiflette, a gratin of potatoes, bacon and cheese, at Bocuse restaurant. Credit: Culinary Institute of America

That it was one of the best bowls of fish soup in recent memory was beyond dispute. Indeed, its only flaw lay with the server, whose description of the dish was a virtual bus tour of bouillabaisse.

“If you look over here, you’ll see our Royal Red shrimp,” he said, setting the bowl before me with a nervous hand. It belonged to a young South Korean who had traveled almost 7,000 miles to study at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and, not incidentally, gain his first front-of-house experience at The Bocuse Restaurant, one of the Hudson Valley campus’ two training restaurants. He pointed to the shrimp. “You’ll find it right there. We lightly poach it for five to seven minutes.”

A bowl of bouillabaisse at Bocuse restaurant, part of the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park. Credit: Culinary Institute of America

“All right,” I said, picking up my spoon. “Bouillabaisse is a mixture of many fishes,” he continued. I set down the spoon. “It’s really whatever our storeroom has for the day.” Fish in a storeroom? I pictured someone rummaging for razor clams in a broom closet. “We like to top it with a very gelatinous fish. Today, it’s monkfish.”

“Gelatinous. Great,” I lied, picking up my spoon.

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For more information about CIA tours for the public, classes for food lovers, where to stay and other activities in the area, go to ciafoodies.com.

“Under the monkfish, we have a fondant potato,” said the young man, still talking, tilting his head as if peering under a car hood. Spoon down. “A fondant potato is a regular potato that is seared on both sides and cooked in the oven so it’s nice and soft on the inside. Very airy. You’ll also find roasted fennel and carrots as well.”

“Can’t wait,” I said, my hand reaching for an imaginary spoon under the table.

“And here we have the croutons,” he went on, pointing out two tiny, agoraphobic toasts on a plate by the soup, “topped with a rouille, which is a paste —”

“A roux?”

“A rouille, which is a paste of mayo, harissa, saffron and Pernod. And then we add some grated Gruyère cheese on top.”

“A lot of heavy lifting for a crouton,” I joked. Silence.

“We recommend tasting it twice. First as itself. You’ll note that it is very fishy. And then we recommend steeping the toast in the sauce. That will completely change the whole dish.”

So will eating cold soup, I thought.

“Please enjoy.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

More than enjoyable, the bouillabaisse approached the divine, its shrimp plump and perfectly poached, its clams and mussels too fine for a storeroom, its broth a cup of pure velvet, so creamy it posed an existential threat to whole baskets of bread. In short, this was bouillabaisse to make the French weep, its deliciousness the product of multiple nervous hands in both the dining room and kitchen, the two separated by a large pane of glass, offering every patron a front-row seat to the controlled chaos behind the scenes.

Top: lunch service at Bocuse restaurant at the Culinary Institute of America. Above, the dining room of American Bounty, another training restaurant at CIA. Credit: Culinary Institute of America

While they’re often booked weeks in advance, Bocuse and American Bounty, the CIA’s other training restaurant, are open to anyone with a reservation who’s willing to drive a couple of hours north. The trip is well worth it for the food, yes — for Bocuse’s tureen of black truffle soup sheathed in puff pastry, the buttery tartiflette (an unctuous gratin of potatoes, bacon and cheese) and, in particular, a dessert composed of white chocolate, Concord grape sorbet, yogurt and pear jam, as impressive as it is unlikely. But the menu may well have changed by the time you see this, and besides, food is far from the only reason that meals at the country’s foremost cooking school are so special. Said specialness is due in part to the students, whose dedication and earnestness, even their missteps, demonstrate a love for the possibilities of food that’s infectious and often moving.

The truffle soup at Bocuse. Credit: Culinary Institute of America

You see them everywhere, tempering chocolate or beating butter blocks in vast kitchens, trudging into Roth Hall (a former Jesuit monastery) for swish-and-spit sommelier classes, lugging trays of raw oysters down a hallway named for alum Anthony Bourdain, sprinting from dorms named Metz and Escoffier that once housed New York chef Mario Carbone and Mexican chef Enrique Olvera, studying in townhouses called Cayenne and Nutmeg, striding down Parsley Way in their chef's whites.

Some are barely 18 or 19, apprentices in an ancient art who — their brief term on this planet notwithstanding — have long sought solace in the kitchen. They were the ones who’d insisted on standing next to grandma, who even as young children used allowance money to buy strange spices and complained when dishes were undersalted, who’d regularly made a mess of countertops in their parents’ kitchens, kicked up dust storms of flour with KitchenAids, left chocolate fingerprints on the refrigerator door.

And what kind of world is waiting for these culinary tyros beyond academia and the CIA’s protective embrace? You don’t have to look very far to find out. Restaurants founded and/or operated by the school’s alumni are scattered across the Hudson Valley, towns like Millbrook (Babette’s Kitchen), Kingston (Ship to Shore), Wappingers Falls (Heritage Food and Drink) and Rhinebeck (Willow at Mirbeau).

Nowhere is that truer than in Poughkeepsie, where alumni restaurants include Lolita’s Pizza, Crew, Mill House Brewing Company and Essie’s Restaurant, a Caribbean-fusion place run by Brandon Walker.

“The minute you walk through the door, there’s this energy of professionalism,” said Walker of his time at the school. “You can tell right away that you’re in an environment of integrity and excellence.”

Chef Brandon Walker, a Culinary Institure of America alum, stirs...

Chef Brandon Walker, a Culinary Institure of America alum, stirs the pot at his place, Essie’s Restaurant in Poughkeepsie. Right, the jerk ribs and cornbread. Credit: Jeffrey Basinger

Walker got a bachelor’s degree in culinary science from the CIA more than two decades ago but still remembers the exact date he started classes (December 3, 1997) and often finds himself nostalgic for his years there. Before starting school, he had almost no professional cooking experience — the Jamaican women in his family, including his grandmother Essie, taught him everything he knew — and he had never even been to Poughkeepsie. Since then, he’s put down serious roots in the town and credits the CIA for training him to think more broadly and creatively about the foods of his youth.

The results are often spectacular. Walker’s signature Bolognese is made with goat meat and a complex tomato sauce amped up by Moroccan flavors, apricots, dates and goat cheese, while his spherical jambalaya croquettes are a riotous blend of shrimp, Cheddar and andouille sausage. Jerk ribs are sauced with sherry and tamarind, and Walker even manages to bring nuance to lowly cornbread, its subtle sweetness a product of Jimmy Red corn paired with a luscious lemon-vanilla butter.

“That’s my grandmother,” he said, pointing to a large black-and-white portrait, one of several hanging in the Essie’s dining room, a cozy setting of exposed brick walls and reclaimed wood that wouldn’t be out of place in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where Walker grew up. “I wanted to pay homage to all the women in my family.”

Essie's Restaurant in Poughkeepsie.

Essie's Restaurant in Poughkeepsie. Credit: Jeffrey Basinger

At the CIA, “You learn about nutrition, you learn about sanitation, you learn about front-of-house,” he said, but the biggest thing CIA teaches is the universe of flavors — flavors familiar and un-, exotic and commonplace, nearby and from the four corners of the earth. These explorations are not academic but crucial, said Walker. “Because that’s what America is.”

It wasn’t always so. Many of us well remember that benighted time when, as Martha Stewart put it in a recent documentary, “American women needed to be redirected from opening up cans of cream of mushroom soup and pouring it on top of broccoli and boiled chicken.”

Because that’s the other reason you need to visit the CIA: to witness firsthand the marvelous and ongoing revolution in American gastronomy. We’ve long been known as a melting pot, of course, but have only recently realized what that pot might yield. The CIA is so much a product of changing attitudes toward food and such a big reason why they’ve changed, it’s hard to imagine one without the other.

On my last evening at the CIA, I dined at American Bounty, which opened in 1982, before words like regional, seasonal and farm-to-table were part of the common culinary conversation. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the restaurant’s creed of cooking with fresh, local ingredients and the fledgling chefs taught to embrace it — one-fifth of all Michelin-star restaurants in America are run by CIA alumni, according to the school — have helped change the way all of us eat. As such, American Bounty ought to be considered hallowed ground, I thought to myself as I ordered a glass of Chaos Theory, a red blend from Napa, not knowing what an apt choice I’d made.

“Someone needs to check on table 27!” barked one server to another as a yawning gap began to open between several tables’ first and second courses. At the same moment, the door to the kitchen began swinging wildly in both directions and seemed destined for a multiple-server pileup. Through a window to the kitchen, a tall student could be seen racing to remove tray after tray of Parker House rolls from an oven even as his toque was being knocked crooked by the ceiling. A manager who did not look like he enjoyed serving cocktails was doing so anyway. And off in the middle distance, a server was describing microgreens as “essentially like regular greens but smaller,” even as my own server bounded up to the table with an amuse-bouche headlined by oh-so-trendy Badger Flame beets, which are “grown on a farm maybe an hour or hour and a half away,” said the young man from Southern California. “It’s sweeter and less earthy. It’s fresher, more vibrant.”

The grilled shrimp appetizer with corn bread, pickled shishito, peppers, bacon and Creole bernaise at American Bounty. Credit: Culinary Institute of America

That was true of all the food I ate that evening, particularly the plate of grilled shrimp over a perfectly round disk of cornbread, but also the lightly fried eggplant schnitzel accompanied by spaetzle and something the menu called a persimmon amba. I know I shouldn’t have, but “So, a persimmon is a type of fruit, and not really local to here but more northern Asia,” said the server.

“Right, but —”

“— It’s kind of like a tomato and plum fusion sort of thing that’s sweet but has the texture of a tomato.”

“The amba part, I meant.”

“Amba is just a cooked sauce, kind of like a compote.”

Hmm. Before sprinting off, he apologized for the poor service, something he would do many times over the course of the evening, eventually explaining that he and the other servers had spent the last seven weeks in the kitchen and only today started their front-of-house rotation.

No apology necessary. Slow service is something that might sink an ordinary restaurant, but American Bounty is not of that ilk. It’s that rare spot where you almost wish things could proceed more slowly, if only for the time it might afford you to watch the next generation of culinary leaders in its infancy. So many things must come off perfectly for a meal to have any chance of approaching perfection. So many skills must be mastered before one may serve food of exceptional quality and creativity to Americans, and so many Americans have come to expect exceptional quality and creativity — well, who could blame CIA students for approaching the profession, as well as visiting diners, with a solemnity bordering on the comic?

THE DETAILS

Note: Reservations are required for both CIA restaurants.

American Bounty

1946 Campus Dr., Hyde Park
845-451-1011 | americanbountyrestaurant.com

The Bocuse Restaurant

1946 Campus Dr., Hyde Park
845-451-1012 | bocuserestaurant.com

Essie's Restaurant

14 Mount Carmel Pl., Poughkeepsie
845-452-7181 | essiesrestaurantpk.com

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