Who doesn’t love food? Not just the act of eating, but the long, sensory ritual of it. A scent simmering on the stove. That first bite that hits the reset button on a heavy week. The way a recipe, passed hand to hand through generations, can carry the weight of an entire country across an ocean and set it down gently on a folding table in front of you.
Once a year, the Chadwick Multicultural Food Festival (MCFF) pulls students and families out of their regular weekend rhythms and into Pascoe Pavilion to share a little bite of everyone’s culture. For one afternoon, the campus stops belonging to Chadwick and starts belonging to the world.
This year, on the afternoon of Apr. 11, more than 530 attendees experienced cuisine, cultural performances, music, and maybe even a few stories of “home” from thirteen different regions of the world
At the MCFF, you walk a few feet away, and the air changes. Cumin to lemongrass to garlic to something sweet you don’t have a name for yet. A grandmother explains a dumpling fold to a sixth-grader who has never held chopsticks. Two dads argue, in good humor, about whose jollof is better. Somewhere in the middle of it all, a stranger takes a first bite of something they’ve never tasted, pauses, and looks up at the student who made it. Just for a second. That look is what the whole afternoon is for.
This year, one baker, Austrian exchange student Clemens Olszewski ’28 had a problem. The local grocery store didn’t speak his language of food. Wrong flour. Wrong butter, the kind that comes in a box instead of a solid block. “The apples weren’t quite right either, too sweet, not as tart as the ones back home,” Olszewski states. He scoured three different stores, scavenging what he could and improvising the rest.
His apfelstrudel was made at 11:00 p.m. the night before the MCFF , the dough pulled and stretched until it was thin enough to read a newspaper through. Apples, cinnamon, and just enough sugar to spark a memory. Rolled. Baked. For one hour, turning the kitchen into a little piece of a Viennese winter Sunday, even if it was neither winter nor Sunday.
It’s easy to resort to stereotypes when thinking about Austria: The Sound of Music, skis, and endless snow. It rarely comes with a specific city, a specific street, or light shining through hand-pulled dough. So, on the afternoon of the MCFF, he set the strudel down on a folding table and waited.
The line at Olszewski’s table grew long.
The first bite stopped people mid-sentence. The second bite usually brought questions: “What is this?” And “Can I have another?” Olszewski answered the same questions over and over, smiling more each time. People came back for seconds. A few came back for thirds, pretending it was for someone else. And his pan emptied faster than he expected.
When asked about what made “Viennese” distinct from “Austrian,” Olszewski responded after thinking for a while, “When a thing is yours, you stop seeing it. You forget it isn’t everyone’s.” He laughed and shrugged. “In Austria, this is just Sunday!”
Around the Pascoe Pavilion Gymnasium, twelve more tables were running on the same logic. Twelve late nights and wrong-ingredient workarounds. Twelve more cooks watching strangers take first bites of their Sunday and react like it was a holiday. Twelve pans, scraped down to the corners by mid-afternoon. The lines didn’t shrink so much as bend, looping into each other until the whole gym was one long line.
By late afternoon, the pans were scraped clean, and the music was still going. Kids were chasing each other around the dance floor with sticky fingers. Attendees were searching for recipes they had no intention of actually making. Somebody’s uncle was trying to teach somebody else’s mom a dance step she clearly already knew. The smell of thirteen kitchens hung in the air long after the food was gone.
At the end of the MCFF, guests left with leftovers wrapped in foil. They left with a list, mental or otherwise, of foods they were going to look up later. They left already asking about next year.
In Austria, this might be just Sunday. At Chadwick, for one day a year, it’s everyone’s Sunday, all at once.
