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The Best College Food
From celebrity chefs to lobster bakes to chocolate fountains, The Daily Beast tracks down the 15 best college meal plans in the country. VIEW OUR GALLERY.
Here’s just a taste of what college students across the country are having for dinner tonight: fresh-caught lobster, Brazilian churrascaria, summer squash apple bisque, and for dessert, handmade Belgian chocolates.
Click Image Below to View Our Gallery of the 15 Best Colleges to Eat At
Once upon a time, colleges served boiled veggies and mystery meat, assembly-line style. Then, in the ‘90s, campus food courts began upgrading to brand-name fast food and fancy salad bars. But to impress today’s prospective students, who were weaned on organic produce, Michael Pollan, and the Food Network, schools are rolling out dining options fit for a visiting head of state. Sushi chefs, gourmet coffee, and organic food are standard now, and large cafeterias are being traded for smaller, more intimate restaurant-style dining. But some schools have upped the ante beyond even that, flying their chefs to far-flung regions where they’re taught to cook authentic international haute cuisine, infusing their campus tap water with hints of cucumber and lemon, and hiring celebrity architects to build dining halls that resemble exclusive Manhattan brasseries—plunked down in the middle of verdant Iowan campuses.
“Curriculums and majors can all be the same from school to school,” says Rich Turnbull, Oregon State University’s head of dining services. “Food and customer service are where you can provide both parents and applicants that ‘wow’ factor.”
“They want to know where their food was grown, who grew it and what technique was used,” adds Beth Gentry, general manager for dining services at Colorado College, of today’s aspiring-foodie college students. “Then they want to come into the kitchen and see how it is prepared.”
Just consider the uproar this fall when Harvard students arrived to find the university had done away with hot breakfast at all but one dining hall. Or Cornell’s decision to cut lunchtime options. Or the University of Massachusetts’ choice to go trayless this year. “Students have come to expect that we will go out of our way to meet whatever their needs are,” says Ken Toong, UMass’s head of dining services. “So, if change inconveniences them, they’re going to feel comfortable resisting it.”
In a world where Thai tom yum gai and steak tartare are essential to any menu, The Daily Beast examined 15 of the country’s award-winning college dining services and what they do to stand out.
Plus: Check out Hungry Beast, for more news on the latest restaurants, hot chefs, and tasty recipes.
Kathleen Kingsbury covers education for The Daily Beast. She also contributes to Time magazine, where she has covered business, health and education since 2005.
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"University of Massachusetts' choice to go trayless this year."
They were not the first college cafeteria to do so. Experience has shown that there is less food wasted when diners have to use plates only to carry food to their table. They tend not to overload and are not inclined to go back for seconds either.
The New Normal Economy will force college kids to deal with their cuisine the way many deal with their marijuana -- grow their own. George Patton
Very nice. That sounds like my undergrad years.
Just as I thought. None of the Schools I ever attended are in this list, which is probably why I remember the food being so bad.
What a stupid waste of time. This is not the kind of frivolous crap I was hoping to find here.
And yet to the rest of us, your smug and caustic comment was the kind of thing that *we'd* hoped to avoid on a site like this. Irony, thy name is rjcrawford33.
Please note the quality of architecture in all of these examples really adds to the quality of the atmosphere and food. However the photo depicting the facility at IIT is not Rem Koolhaas' work. The dinning hall is in the original Mies Van der Rohe building. Koolhaas did the addition.
You left out the Culinary Institute of America! And don't tell me you're only including traditional colleges - we're accredited, we have bachelor's students, and we have a media wing to rival any ivy league school. And while the quality of the food is variable (we all cook for each other), the variety is astounding (from burgers to korean to brazilian to german to assorted plated desserts, we have options), the passion is overwhelming (it's the whole reason we're here!) - and we run five restaurants open to the public (at the Hyde Park, NY campus alone).
Oregon State and Virginia Tech (Nos. 1 and 2 on The Daily Beast's list) were winners in May of Restaurants & Institutions magazine's Ivy Awards. http://bit.ly/sBGLw
It's great to see WUSTL on this list. For more detailed information about the state of dining on campus (and to get a sense for some of the conversations that have shaped the debate about campus food), check out the coverage from Student Life, the campus newspaper: http://www.studlife.com/news/2009/09/30/campus-dining-debate
-consumes-student-body/
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