As chef and co-owner of King, the acclaimed Mediterranean restaurant in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, Clare de Boer learned how cooking and eating food can make time stand still. “Meals are one of our precious final frontiers,” she says. “People slow down, really look at the person across from them—and even put away their phones—to share the moment.” Now, she’s applying those lessons at her first solo venture, Stissing House, which she opened, with the help of Italian chef Oliviero Borgna and pastry chef Suzanne Nelson, in mid-March in the Hudson Valley town of Pine Plains. The goal for her incarnation of this two-story 1782 farmhouse-style building, which once housed the second-oldest inn in the United States, is not merely to serve food. It’s far beyond that, de Boer says: “It’s to hold time by creating a space that allows people to connect.”