Ask the College Dining Hall Employee

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In honor of my school and employer, Virginia Tech, being named number 1 in the 2008 Princeton Review best Campus Food list, I’ve decided to try out a thread that’s been swirling around in my head for a while.

I work in West End Market, the nicest dining center on campus. Specifically, I work in JP’s Chop House, a shop within West End that sells (in my not especially humble opinion) the best food to be had on campus. We sell what I’ve heard described as home-style food: carved meat, baked chicken, mashed potatoes, steamed veggies and the like.

In Chop (as employees call the shop), I’m Student Staff. That means that on any given day, I could be doing anything from running the grill to working a register to food preparation to carving London Broil. Most often I find myself on grill and prep lately.

With that introduction, ask away. If it’s anything like most of my threads, this will sink like a lead anvil in quicksand. Oh well, have at it.

2

Wow, I was in the dorms from 1975-1977. Things were a bit different back then. Can anyone on a meal plan go to JP’s Chop Shop? What’s the most costly wholesale item on your menu? Can you eat as much as you want? What is the per day budget per student? Can you just wander in from the public and buy a meal? If you can, what does it cost? Do you have a sushi bar on campus? Is it still pretty easy to sneak in? It wasn’t very hard at UCSB, especially if you had friends. Yikes, you were the guy reporting in during the shooting, weren’t you?

3

Sorry if my answers come out a bit wordy. There were a lot of questions and I want answer them all thoroughly.

Yep. All of Tech’s dining centers accept any university meal plan. These days (and maybe those days, for all I know) you access your meal plan with a swipe of your student ID card.

Depends how much you plan to eat. We sell grilled-to-order rib-eye steaks by the ounce ($1.40 per ounce for for regular or $1.65 for Bourbon Street marinated) You can buy one of those anywhere from 6 oz, all the way up to 20. We also sell whole Maine lobsters at about $26 each (prices went up at the start of the semester so I don’t remember the exact price; it’s probably $26.50.)

If only. Most dining halls at Tech sell food a la carte. At West End, you order your food at whichever of our various shops you want and get your card swiped to pay for whatever specific food you ordered. You can of course order more, but it does cost more.
There are a couple of all you care to eat dining halls (as they are now called; apparently, some people took the phrase “all you can eat” as a challenge) on campus. D2 dining center in Dietrick Hall is the best known of these. The foods not nearly as good as at West End (or any of the other dining halls for that matter) and is known to cause a form of gastrointestinal distress known as the Turkey Trots (which lead to the famed Dietrick Dash.)

There’s no set budget per day. Most meal plans give a specific amount of money per semester. The two most popular are the Major Flex and Mega Flex plans, which come with $413 and $513, respectively (I have no clue how they got these numbers.) The main advantage of a flex plan is that everything you pay for with one in an a la carte dining center gets a 50% discount, so the steaks I mentioned above are 70 and 82.5 cents per ounce and the lobster is “only” $13.25. If you find your meal plan running low, you can add funds to it and still receive the same discount.
Generally, I try not to spend more than $3.25 per meal (after the flex discount) except on rare occasions. I know several people who self impose similar limits to prolong their meal plans.

Yes, although it’s a little more complicated at West End than at most dining halls. Most of our on campus dining centers take cash and a few take credit cards. West End has a completely card based system so you need either a university ID (with associated meal plan or debit account) or a West End card, dispensed at an machine near the front office. Money you put on the card can then be accessed with a swipe at any register in West End and, when you’re done, you can trade the card in at the office for however much money is left on it after your purchase. The cash cards don’t get the discounts that meal plans enjoy.

No. Sushi is available at DX, an express (read: fast food) dining center in Dietrick. It’s supposedly made on site and pretty good, but I’ve never worked up the courage to buy sushi from Dietrick.

With how West End’s set up, you have to swipe your ID as you order so sneaking it isn’t a factor. At the all you can eat places, where you swipe as you come in, I image it’s still possible but they control the line tightly enough that I image it doesn’t happen too often.

That was me. Things have definitely quieted down a bit since then. It’s tough to believe that it all happened six months ago last week.

4

Are the teen movie clichés true? Are you a gifted-but-poor scholarship student working your way through school, getting picked on by the rich kids who laugh at your uniform and make your lilfe hell?

5

Do you work with handicapped people?

6

Heh heh heh. I almost feel like that would be more interesting. I’m a semi-gifted upper middle class student who realized a year and a half ago that his resume looked a little bit empty. Thus, seeking employment in the most convenient location, I went to work for Virginia Tech Dining Services. The uniforms aren’t bad, and the customers are (in general) pretty cool.

Personally, the only person I work with who could be called handicapped by any stretch of the imagination is a girl who has knee problems and thus sits on a chair at the register rather than standing like everyone else. She can stand and walk, but it gets painful if she does so for an extended time. There is at least one paraplegic worker over at Owens Food Court; she also works mostly at register.

7

Better yet, are you a Danish prince who just wants to get away from the paparazzi for a while?
Also, do you still serve the turkey divan (broccoli rolled in turkey slices with industrial cheese sauce) I loved as an underclassman?

8

Do you serve Calico Skillet? What is the most not-readily-identifiable-as-food item on your menu?

9

Shhhh.

I had never heard of this dish before reading your post. It sounds pretty good though. Mmmm, industrial cheese sauce.

I’d also never heard of this. Having looked it up, I still can’t imagine what it would look like and Google’s image search is less than helpful.

Hmmm. That’s a tough one. All of our food looks like food. (With the exception of lobsters, which in my opinion don’t look like anything edible.) If it’s thrown together in a hurry, our crispy grilled chicken can look pretty odd. It’s a grilled chicken breast, served on a pile of mashed potatoes and topped with gravy and fried onion curls. It’s very good but looks a little weird (but still food like) at first.

10

On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you hate your customers? :slight_smile:

Well, the annoying ones anyway…

11

Most customers: 2. Without them, the job would be really, really boring.

Annoying customers: I’d have to say up to 4, maybe peaking at 5 on rare occasion. My most common pet peeve is the customers who order their meals to go (in a nature murdering Styrofoam box) and then eat it in the dining hall anyways. You do know that we have plates, right? Even worse is when one customer in line talks all their friends into doing the same thing.
“Hey man, get it To Go.” “Why? Aren’t we eating here?” “Yeah, but just get it To Go.”
I sometimes wish I could smash those people over the head with our Fiesta-ware plates.

12

I think I know what I want for supper. Yum.

13

I worked at a college dining hall for a semester a couple of years ago at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Definitely an interesting job.

14

Evey single University cafeteria I have ever eaten in, whether in Tennessee or Florida, always served fried okra at every single lunch & dinner.

Do you commit this atrocity?

15

I worked at a dining hall my senior year (1973-74) at Univ. of Del. I suspect that the dining hall options then were quite different from today. I worked at one of the better dining halls, one that was small enough that the food wasn’t too mass-produced drek. Mostly, I checked meal tickets! We didn’t have to punch them or anything; you just looked at the ticket to make sure that they had the right package on there, then you let them in the door. I did work on the line once or twice a week and at least once a week I worked the dishroom line. The regular workers and the kids mostly got along together – there was a large bunch of kids who worked in the cafeterias. One time I did the “floater” position, but that mostly involved replacing condiments, which you had to go down into the basement and haul these -huge- jars of relish, mayo, etc. out to re-fill - they were pretty heavy! I never “volunteered” to do that job again. :stuck_out_tongue: My pay? $2/hour, which was minimum wage at the time! I did love it, though – well, I enjoyed being able to have spending money.

16

My experience at UC San Diego–admittedly a very long time ago*–was that nobody would hassle anyone for working a part-time on-campus job. Although, I never had such a job myself, so maybe you don’t know about it unless you’re in that situation.

*I’m from the Prehistoric Era—now I read my Alumni Association magazine, and all the “traditions” they talk about have started up since I graduated. And the buildings have real names now…it’s not Central University Library anymore, it’s Geisel Library. Personally I liked the old names better. “Undergraduate Science Building”. “Applied Math and Physics”. “Psych and Ling”.

And stay off my lawn.

17

Serves you right for attending college in the South. At my state school in Ohio, we didn’t even know what fried okra was.

Industrial cheese sauce, though, we knew what that was.

And now, a question for the OP: Are there any non-students working there that have “pets?” When I was in college, a 50-ish unmarried woman in one dining hall decided it was her mission in life to pamper the hockey team. Every game day, they’d eat lunch at that hall, and she had special, intricately decorated cookies for them that she’d made at home and brought with her.

I found this weird, and fairly sad, actually. Have you ever seen anything like that, or was she just a strange one?

18

What’s “okra”?

When I was at the University of Waterloo, I lived in residence (all the first-year students had to) and ate in the residence dining hall. We had this meatloaf that tasted great but whose freshly-cut surface gradually darkened as it sat there on the plate. We had a theory that it was oxidising. Any idea what that was?

19

When’s your shift? I’ve been meaning to try some of the more traditional food at West End, and the Chop Shop does look good, but I almost always get a wrap at the semi-Mexican place or a quesadilla at the grill in front.

And personally, I find most of the food at D2 quite good, though they have their off days, and I’ve also never had any stomach problems. (Last Friday I think it was, I had eaten about half of my curly fries before I realized that they tasted distinctly worse than usual.)

20

I am proud to say that I have never seen any fried okra anywhere within West End (and I’ve been through the stock room enough that I’d know if they were hiding some.)