Retirees live large with meals at tony Academy: Kitchen is run like a restaurant

Retirees live large with meals at tony Academy

Kitchen is run like a restaurant

By Kyle Wagner, Denver Post Dining Critic, Jun 1, 2005, The Denver Post

Boulder — It was hard to choose among the Senegalese chicken curry with pumpkin seeds and coconut; the tilapia based in a ginger-citrus glaze and served atop couscous; and the lemon sole in a white wine butter sauce with fresh asparagus.

And that was before desserts of housemade raspberry sorbet, fig and strawberry turnover with rum caramel sauce and sabayon, and a poached pear with honey-orange mascarpone cheese.

A meal at the latest hip restaurant? Fare from a celebrity chef? The menu from a show on the Food Network?

None of the above. This was another typical dinner at The Academy, a retirement community in Boulder dedicated to running itself like a five-star hotel, with dining experiences to match.

For the 60 residents, all over age 55 but most between 60 and 90, who call The Academy home, it's a place that simply continues a lifestyle to which they already had become accustomed. These are retired scientists, doctors, lawyers and advisers to various government entities.

Many of them have family ties of some sort to Colorado, but they come from all over the country. What most of them also have in common is their love of good food and wine, and they claim that was a major selling point when they picked the Academy over other retirement options.

"We're just older, we're not dead yet, and neither are our palates," laughs John Richardson, a native Boulderite who has lived at the Academy for three years after spending much of his life in Washington, D.C. "I eat out in Boulder restaurants all the time, and sometimes down in Denver, and when I eat here at the Academy's dining room, I know I will find the same kind of food I get in the best restaurants in the area."

That's exactly what the eight members of the development group that founded the Academy wanted to offer when they launched the project in the late 1980s.

The group took over the former Mount St. Gertrude's Academy Catholic girls' school, originally built in 1892 by Sister Mary Theodore O'Connor, which sites two blocks from Chautauqua Park. They gutted the buildings and renovated them following the guidelines set down by the National Register of Historic Places, on which the Academy is listed.

It means that the rooms, including the Piñons Dining Room, have retained an elegance that imbues mealtimes with a homey, upscale-eatery feel, with walls the color of fresh butter, plaid upholstered chairs, antique wood tables, book-lined shelves and dark carpeting.

The cheerful, efficient servers are mostly students from Boulder High School who come to work the 4 to 7 p.m. shift.

The kitchen staff is one that many restaurants would envy: four full-timers, two of them culinary school graduates, al overseen by chef John Butera, once co-owner of Boulder's popular Two Bitts Bistro and a chef for several other area eateries until two of the Academy's founders, Gary Berg and Karen McMurray, tapped him to help implement their vision.

"We really wanted to reinvent the way retirement communities do food, and that's basically what we've done, " Butera says. "When people come to a retirement place, they expect Jell-O and corn dogs. It's so refreshing to see the looks on their faces when they see what we do here."

What they do here includes regular wine tastings where residents bring favorite bottles to share, as well as monthly themed cooking seminars featuring international cuisines and weekly get-togethers for appetizers and drinks.

Varying numbers of meals are included in the Academy's base cost of $3,700 to $5,600 a month; higher rates can net room service, laundry, home health care and other perks or necessities. The Academy is usually nearly full with a waiting list for some residences, including its assisted living facility, and in the fall the owners will open an Alzheimer's home based on the same model a few miles away.

The residents living in the bungalows and apartments also have their own kitchens, but most admit that they either eat their meals at the Academy or in one of Boulder's fine dining establishments.

"Oh, I love L'Atelier and Frasca," says Herta Hess Kahn, a native German who moved her from Chicago a year and a half ago. "But the great thing is, I can get that caliber of food right where I live too."

Butera, along with chefs Dave Neale and Nikki Idol and kitchen staffers Polo Caballero and Martin Tremillo, works hard to keep that caliber high, constantly asking residents for their input on favored dishes and revamping the menu to reflect trends and seasons.

"That's the benefit of running this place like a regular restaurant, and having a small number of residents," Butera says. "I can't take the BLT off the lunch menu, because they love those, but if someone says 'Hey, back home we had Yankee pot roast.' Or 'I really like Boston cream pie,' we can put that on the menu for a night or even on the regular menu for a while if enough people like it."

The dining room offers a regular menu as well as daily specials and desserts, but it's the level of quality and sophistication that strikes most visitors, especially for some of the wine dinners the Academy regular holds.

For example, one menu included lobster cocktail with green tea aspic, seared Hudson Valley foie gras with caramelized shallot jelly, cool peach soup, roast pheasant and wild elk done two ways.

"They're serious about wine here, too, which what's important to me," says Stan Ruttenberg, a native Boulderite who moved into the Academy in 1998 and has a 700 wine bottle collection in his bungalow. He's eyeing the 2000 Gran Coronas Reserva that Butera has set out for lunch, and the two of them open it and compare it with one they'd sampled before.

"Considering that the number of senior people is expected to double in the next 15 to 20 years, I think the Academy is on to something," Butera says. "I think we're setting the bar high for other retirement communities to look at and for people to consider when they look at where they'll spend their later years."