Culinary Arts Museum
July is National Culinary Arts Month, so why not head off to the Johnson & Wales University campus at 315 Harborside Boulevard, Providence, Rhode Island, and visit the Culinary Arts Museum. There are a half-dozen really big reasons: it’s a diner museum, a stove museum, a pantheon of chefs, a New England Tavern, a showplace of kitchen gadgets and appliances plus a place to see presidential place settings for state dinners. The Museum started in 1979 with a donation of 7,500 cookbooks dating back to the 1500s. A museum of five centuries of culinary history was born.Ten years later, Chef Louis Szathmary of “The Bakery”, a famed Chicago restaurant, donated some 64,000 items from his personal collection. Other donations have come from Zack Hanle of Bon Appetit magazine, New York Times columnist Jean Hewitt, Gourmet magazine founder Earle MacAusland and the inimitable Julia Child.