Archived Edition: May 04, 2004 | Back to Current	Sep 10, 2010

Dining Services gauges opinion
Shomik Dutta - FORMER EDITOR

Dining Services recently conducted a comprehensive review of its campus operations in an effort to better gauge its strengths and weaknesses and prepare for the dining shake-up that is anticipated during the construction of the new student center. The project report, organized by Bob Volpi, director of Dining Services, and Ching Ho ’03, drew upon surveys completed by 937 students – just under half of the student body – and was presented in March to every dining hall manager and chef.

“We sat down, we agreed on a statement that this has never been done before and therefore we felt in all fairness that we didn’t know what areas we weren’t hitting the mark on, but understood that now we know and can do something about it,” Volpi said. Previous surveys had been done manually and never approached the breadth of issues or sampling size this survey boasted.



The report analyzed the student responses through several demographic categories, breaking students down by ethnicity, income and athletics; surveyors were pleased to find that their numbers closely mirrored the real campus demographics.

The questions spanned a wide and eclectic array of 36 issues, ranging from dining hall popularity to staff friendliness to glass cleanliness.

Overall, Mission and Dodd ranked as the most popular dining halls, followed closely by Greylock. Baxter and Driscoll both experienced a precipitous drop-off as second-tier dining halls.

While students indicated high satisfaction with theme dinners, specialty cafeterias (such as Baxter North) and staff personalities, they expressed considerable frustration over the general flavor and taste of staple foods, highlighting problems with meats and vegetables.

“That [aspect of the survey results] was probably the most disappointing for me personally, because students rated those [meats and vegetables] highly in terms of importance,” Volpi said. “I definitely feel we can do a better job.”

Executive Chef Mark Thompson has already sketched out an action plan to address student distaste for the basic dishes, in which he hopes to reduce the size of cooking batches, introduce more display cooking and work to realize more consistently across cafeteria kitchens in cooking styles.

“Some of it is relatively simple stuff – how are we cutting the vegetables? How does that affect their appearance and taste? That can affect the way students enjoy their meals,” Thompson said. Thompson indicated that custom order stir-fry stations, pasta stations, smoothie stations and vegetarian stations are also in the works, and will probably be implemented by this summer.

Other hot spots of concern for students included the dining experience at the Driscoll cafeteria, the lack of ethnic cuisines, the hours of meal service and the availability and taste of fruits. Volpi said these findings will trigger a “massive overhaul” of operations – including the renovation of Driscoll slated for next summer – but also stressed the necessity of continued student input in affecting positive change.

“One idea is to have a ‘Dine with the Manager and Chef Night,’ so that in each dining hall there’d be a chance to meet the chef and manager,” Volpi said. “Students can actually sit down with them and actually talk about the dining hall, giving suggestions, noting advancements and help continue an ongoing relationship.”

In an effort to further plug his department into the student pulse, Volpi also presented a detailed summary of the survey to College Council (CC), who in turn formed a task-group devoted to working with Dining Services on improving problems highlighted by the survey. Ilunga Kalala ’05, CC co-President, expressed enthusiasm for the quality of the survey itself, but was disappointed by many of the findings.

“At the very least, this has clued Dining Services into a lot of problems they were previously unaware of,” Kalala said. “And with the help of the CC committee, we should be able to make some substantial improvements.”

Of particular concern to Volpi was the disproportionately high number of African American students who expressed disappointment with their dining experiences and consistently rated foods lower than the rest of the student body. In response, Volpi expects to seek out the Black Student Union’s (BSU) input on more recipes and theme dinners.

“[African American students] are used to eating different types of foods at home,” said Lily Colon ’06, the Minority Coalition Representative to CC and a BSU member. “The disconent stems mostly from the lack of spice and flavor in the food.”

In an effort to preempt some of the traffic problems expected during the construction of the new student center, the survey also examined the geographic distribution of students to the various student centers.

The survey found 31 percent of students currently claiming Baxter as their primary hall for meals, followed by Mission at 24, Greylock at 20, Driscoll at 16 and Dodd at eight.

Without Baxter, the survey projected Mission and Greylock as bearing the brunt of dislocated Baxter patrons, followed by Dodd and Driscoll (see graphic).

In order to ease overcrowding and long lines, the report recommended implementing continuous service from breakfast to lunch, serving breakfast across all four dining halls, universally extending dinner until 7:30 p.m., adding additional take-out options for lunch and extending lunch hours until 1:30 p.m. Volpi indicated that Dining Services would implement virtually every recommendation.

“The real key will be setting up the quickest service we can set up in order to address the problem of traffic,” he said. “We need to improve speed of service without reducing the quality of our food.”