Got a picky eater kid. Based on your own experience as a student, or as a parent of a child at the school, or from the past visit experience, could you please talk about the quality/taste/variety of food served at the listed schools for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Do any of these schools have kosher/ vegan/vegetarian/ options? If a student does not like the served food, what alternatives (free/paid) they have in their schools?
Since Iām a parent, I donāt know ALL the details of the food at Hotchkiss. But it is good. They do their food in-house, they donāt use a big corporation like Sodexho. They have their own farm where the school raises a lot of its food (with the help of students, working on the farm can be an extracurricular equivalent to sports). There is always a lot of choice. There is always a vegetarian option, and the food is labeled, e.g. GF. V etc for gluten free, vegetarian and the like. I do not know about kosher food.
Thereās always a salad bar, a sandwich bar, and a stir fry station where students can make their own meals. And a couple of hot entrees and sides. I think thereās usually a pasta dish too, not 100% sure of that. Ice cream machines. Again, I donāt know every last detail so this list is not exhaustive.
If a student wants to eat elsewhere thereās the snack bar, where they can buy burgers, grilled cheese, smoothies, cookies, etc etc. And, the dorms have dorm feeds (between 10 - 11) at least once a week, where the dorm faculty will either make something (milk & cookies, or nachos or something similar) or they will get take out and have, e.g., pizza.
Finally several local restaurants deliver to the campus, so after all that if your son is still hungry, he can order from Mizzas for pizza/italian, the Golden Wok for Chinese, the Boathouse for sushi (or anything else on the restaurant menu) and Iām pretty sure thereās a Mexican restaurant that delivers too.
I suspect your son will do fine at any of those schools with the food choices!
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Iāve eaten lunch and dinner at Paresky (Andover) and the variety of choices was frankly astonishing. Iād say if you canāt find something to your liking then youāre picky indeed! As to quality, the things Iāve had ranged from good/solid to very-good. Whatās fun is that just about everyone on campus has a very specific favorite thing to recommend, so itās fun to seek those things out.
This is all pre-covid. So far with covid itās been āgrab and goā which has been a mixed bag. FAR less variety, and definitely not as good.
Iāve eaten in the cafeterias as Andover, Exeter, Choate and Lawrenceville. There are plenty of options in all of them. Even picky eaters will find something they like.
My son boarded at Lville. And on nights, many of the kids ordered delivery from the nearby restaurants. There was also a pizza joint right across the street. Also on Wed and Sat nights, they had a āFeedā ā where the parents chip in and provide a late night meal for the kids in each house.