As incongruous as it may seem, the meatball and the CIA have found common ground within the Institute’s curriculum. CIA, say hello to Meatball City, the new student-designed restaurant.

Narine’s life’s work can be summed up as demystifying the exotic and making the faraway local.

Chocolate vendors, a skateboard race, a Chocolate Wars dessert-making competition, the Chocolate Olympics at the Red Hook Public library and a theatrical performance at the Chocolate Factory. A horse-drawn haywagon will take folks to and from the village to the Factory at no charge.

Listening to Gary Allen on the history of food is akin to listening to Shelby Foote ruminating on the Civil War, Roger Angell discoursing on baseball, or Neil de Grasse Tyson holding forth on the past, present and future of the cosmos.

Long before designer microbreweries emerged to dot the Hudson Valley landscape, the stalwart patriarch Matthew Vassar owned and operated a