<p>From what I’ve noticed BSes w/ good food tend to publicize that fact. Deerfield and NMH definitely did, lol. </p>
<p>I’ve noticed that Exeter’s food is blase but tolerable- hey, it’s school food!</p>
<p>If the OP is comparing left coast food to NE food, then time to call it quits. As someone who spent years of the left coast, the food at where nearly all these NE boarding schools are located will be unappealing.
But you have to compare apples to apples. How does Deerfield or Andover food compare to Cate and Thacher? If you just compare New England boarding food to left coast restaurants, that’s not fair.</p>
<p>I’m with Alex. You West Coasters just have no idea how good you’ve got it, with year-round fresh produce spilling out of your farms. On my last visit to CA, we went to a farmer’s market that had SEVEN types of peaches! Up here, we’re lucky to eat a peach that’s not rock hard and green in the middle of the growing season. </p>
<p>It’s like Alice Waters admonishing Americans to eat locally at all times. Love to–but unless I want to exist on venison, I’m limited to about 3 months of local eating a year.</p>
<p>The food at Cate is outstanding. It’s fresh, tasty and there’s good variety. In a recent Aramark Culinary Excellence competition of more than 150 chefs from colleges, universities and conference centers from across North America, Cate’s chef and his team finished third overall, earning the bronze medal. They also won the silver medal in the American Culinary Federation competition. Here’s a link - <a href=“http://www.cate.org/news/detail/?id=1817[/url]”>http://www.cate.org/news/detail/?id=1817</a></p>
<p>Come on, guys. No one is making boarding school decisions based on what food options they have in the school cafeteria, although it’s always a topic of interest especially to parents. As a matter of fact, it is so low in the list of factors to be considered when deciding which school to choose that it’s ignorable. That been said, parents should voice their concerns to the schools their kids are attending and try to make things better. Sometimes it may not be a matter of cost but rather how the cafeteria is operated.</p>
<p>This thread is supposed to cover food and dining halls. A lot has been said about the food at various BS’s, but what about the dining halls? </p>
<p>As for dining halls, I thought that of the 10 schools my son and I visited in 2009 during his app process, the most impressive dining hall was the one at the Hill School. The walls were mostly covered with oak paneling and stately paintings/portraits. The room was spacious and well lit; there were large chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and huge windows throughout the hall. Dark wooden beams span the ceiling. The hall is so captivating that a picture of it graces the cover of Tobias Wolff’s book “Old School”.</p>
<p>FOOOOODDDD should be a MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR factor in school decision. If I don’t like the food there, I will not be happy there. I went to a boarding school for a few months in another country and they are reputed to have the best food that is offered in boarding school within that country. The food is awesome but sometimes they’ll slack into giving pasta for lunch 3 days in a row. They follow a nutritional guideline.</p>
<p>Well, my son didn’t go to Exeter for its scintillating cuisine OR its lovely dining halls, that’s for certain. The food’s fine. The dining hall’s a bit of an architectural disaster, but if you’re a teenage boy, it’s really just a place to stuff food into your belly, and it beats the public school by a mile. </p>
<p>The salads, veggies, and fruit choices are adequate at Exeter–guess I never expected fine cuisine. My only gripe is the lack of whole grains–brown rice, whole wheat rolls, etc. I did notice at Parent’s Week-end that they’re using healthier pasta–the stuff that’s been enriched with extra protein and vitamins without actually looking brown. I suppose that schools have to balance between what’s healthy and what most kids will actually choose to eat…</p>
<p>Also, I’d like to add that at Hotchkiss, you can recommend recipes of your home country or place or your mom’s special dish. They’ll make it for you!!! I just love that.</p>
<p>Andover’s dinning hall is decent. We’re talking about a cafeteria after all. Try eating in a fine restaurant for four years and see how long it takes to get fed up.</p>
<p>I really feel bad for the kids who are used to eating ethnic meals at home and have to deal with cafeteria fare. How awful it must be to eat pasta with institutional marinara when you’re used to southern Indian cuisine or authentic Thai cooking. Our family has a rather specialized cuisine that can’t even really be had in restaurants around here, so I’m sure my son will have a list of things that he wants me to cook. That said, I think that after three months of cafeteria, anything homecooked will be WONDERFUL.</p>
<p>Andover’s dining hall, the newly renovated Paresky Commons, is lovely. My daughter is happy with the food, too, though she loves to get off campus for a meal when she can.</p>
<p>We love farmers’ markets and buy most of our food for the week at the local market. On our first parent’s weekend visit to California, we happened to walk by a farmer’s market in Ojai on a Sunday morning. The array of greens, vegetables and fruits, the range of choices, the vivid colors of everything, the olive oils, breads, herbs, flowers etc completely blew us away. It was on a whole other level from what we were (are) used to in Philadelphia and D.C.</p>
<p>You’ll be well nourished at any boarding school in the U.S., I suppose. But from a purely food perspective, the quality and variety of a southern California farmer’s market is going to give the Cates and Thachers an unfair starting position. It’s a food paradise in that part of the world.</p>
<p>Thacher: Stop already…you’re making me drool as I eat my way through my last jar of refrigerator pickles and look morosely outside at the frozen ground…</p>
<p>lemonade, when my S and I visited PA in the winter of `09, we couldn’t tour the dining hall; it was under renovation then. I’m not surprised that it is lovely. So many of the buildings at Andover are grand, unlike the Hill School. Maybe the dining hall at Hill stood out so much to us because of the high contrast between it and a lot of the other buildings there, especially the dorms.</p>
<p>In my view, the building of Andover’s dinning hall is marvelous, and the decorations and hardware are great too except the “cheap” tables/chairs, which don’t match up with the surroundings.</p>
<p>DAndrew, my d had the same complaint.</p>
<p>My son almost passed out when he saw the brick pizza oven. I don’t think he noticed that the dining hall contained furniture. Function over form, when it comes to food for teenaged boys. :)</p>
<p>For the OP, could your daughter start a cooking club on campus? It would be an opportunity for students to share their food heritage (if you know what I mean by that term), to socialize over something other than takeout, and for some, to learn how to cook.</p>