In the 129 years The Lantern Inn has run in Wassaic, it’s a safe bet that dim sum never headlined the menu. And yet one recent weekend we perched in the wood-paneled bar, savoring crystal shrimp dumplings, pork siu mai, crispy sticky rice, and steamed mushroom buns redolent of the local forest where their filling was foraged. This culinary effort is the restaurant’s first Lantern Festival, a traditional Chinese closing celebration of the Lunar New Year. Managers Minh Le and Erika DaSilva and chef James O’Neill found the shared name too tempting to resist—despite their untested wrapping technique. “None of us had ever done anything like this before,” laughed Le. “Five types of dumplings, 1,500 total, were made in the week leading up to the event.” He shows us a video: hands spoon translucent shrimp into dough, then fold the edges into delicate Art Deco pleats. One down, 1,499 to go. “We are insane,” he adds. The foamy texture of their bao is delectable madness.

Elastic is the spirit of this Dutchess County hamlet that continues to embrace reinvention. Since 1890, the Lantern has led many lives: boarding house, speakeasy, factory worker haunt. Today it sustains mingling regulars, day-trippers, and artists from the nearby Wassaic Project.

Facing the Lantern, the arts residency—a renovated grain mill seven stories tall—hosts revolving cadres of creators in its studios and galleries. The public can visit during exhibitions, a summer music festival, and monthly open studios. We wandered rustic staircases on a winter Saturday, welcomed by artists-in-residence from across the country. In her studio, Nicole Dyer’s chromatic cupcake sculptures ooze in a bakery box, globs of insulation foam and spackle combed with acrylic and lurid clay candy. A half floor down, Aeon Ginsberg crafts verses of gender identity, destruction, and transformation. Their poetry marinates in science fiction, bureaucratic violence, the tension of corporal material that shifts, strives. “Watch as I create myself again every year,” they write. Through Aeon’s literary practice they refashion themself, in this place ripe for new histories.

3/7/2019