2026 Hamilton College Honorary Degree
Presented to Stephen Durfee ’85
Creativity takes many forms, among them painting, literature, dance, music — and, perhaps, most relevant to our everyday lives … food.
Throughout your career as a pastry chef extraordinaire, you’ve often used chocolate to represent your own artistic expression. Where Rembrandt, Picasso, and so many others used paint to create their masterpieces, you use cacao beans and sugar to craft culinary experiences that have made you famous the world over.
In her poem “Chocolate,” former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove described the decadent dessert as a “velvet fruit” that can make one “crumble to ruin.” Another poet described how these “velvet whispers melt on the tongue,” … “where every flavor feels like a song sung.” And so we acknowledge the many songs you have sung through your masterful work with this timeless ingredient.
Both of your parents were teachers, and you spent three years in a classroom after leaving College Hill in 1985, but it wasn’t the right career for you — at least not at that moment. Your first food-related job was as a dishwasher — hardly glamorous, but you remember being thrilled by the restaurant’s “energy, the controlled chaos, [and] the artistry.” Eventually, you settled in the Napa Valley at The French Laundry, which The New York Times food critic at the time called the “most exciting place to eat in America.” There, as executive pastry chef, you were named one of the “10 Best Pastry Chefs in America” and won the 1998 James Beard Foundation’s Award for “Pastry Chef of the Year.”
You subsequently returned to teaching, this time as professor of baking and pastry arts at the Culinary Institute of America, teaching courses in chocolate, confectionery, cakes, and plated desserts. Today, you are director of curriculum at Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco, a bean-to-bar chocolate factory where you lead tastings, tours, and classes, and — with the education team — craft exquisite chocolate experiences.
You once said, the most rewarding part of teaching is when a former student becomes successful. We feel the same way. This morning, to demonstrate our pride in your accomplishments, we present you with this honorary degree.
Steven Tepper
President
May 24, 2026
