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Welcome to Yale, the Restaurant
Roughly 10,000 students swell the campus during the academic year, and they all have to eat. For those who choose the Yale dining halls, the variety is extraordinary, and the quantity is daunting.The challenge for the university is to stay ahead of student tastes without going broke.
December 1998
by Douglas Clement
Douglas Clement is the managing editor of the Litchfield County Times.
Vegans can be a challenge. Going a step beyond vegetarians, strict vegans (pronounced VEE-genz) will not eat anything that contains animal by-products—no eggs, no milk, no cream. The problem is most acute at dessert time: how to satisfy a sweet tooth without a spritz of whipped cream? When the vegan happens to be a Yale student, however, the University dining hall system is happy to oblige. While their more indulgent classmates are tucking into strawberry ice cream and chocolate cheesecake, vegans can turn without compromise or embarrassment to Tofutti, a non-dairy frozen delight, or any number of other dietarily correct options.
The problem does not arise often at the 13 major dining facilities on the central campus. But when an institution is feeding 4,300 undergraduates and a substantial portion of the University’s 5,000 graduate students daily, it has to be prepared for all sorts of special demands. In registering their likes and dislikes, the students, says Karen Dougherty, a registered dietician who oversees the University’s nutrition services, “are not shy.”
Years ago, Yale students pretty much ate what was put before them. Indeed, Yale’s food-service operation is still based largely on the model developed in the 1930s when the residential colleges put an end to eating clubs. There are now 11 kitchens serving the colleges, as well as one for Commons and another at the Graduate School. (Independent retailers cover Kline Biology Tower, the Art and Architecture café, the Durfee Sweet Shop, the Law School, the Medical School, and Donaldson Commons at the School of Management.) All of the original facilities were designed to provide three “squares” a day during what were once normal dining hours.
But dining hours aren’t what they once were; students often pass up dinner at 6, preferring heavy snacks deep into the night. Late-risers have little use for bacon and eggs at 7, and seek out nourishment closer to noon, which moves lunch to what the British consider tea-time, leaving an ever-smaller gap until dinner. Says Eric Uscinski, Yale’s associate director of dining services: “Somewhere that gap will close.” Nor is the favored fare the same. Pizza on Broadway has overtaken pot roast in the dining hall, and tofu has outdistanced corned beef hash as a staple. “There was a time when you piled a bunch of carbohydrates on the table and everybody was happy,” recalls deputy provost Charles Long. No more.
To deal with the changes in schedule and menu, the University this fall made a major change in the way it provides food to its students. Abandoning a decades-old practice of handling the process in-house, Yale hired an executive from Aramark, a private, Philadelphia-based management firm that operates the food concessions at New York’s Shea Stadium and Mesa Verde National Park, among other locales.
The head of the redesigned operation, Duane Clark, has inherited an administrative staff of nearly 60. Clark brings to his job some impressive experience at the University of Delaware, where he was responsible for feeding 17,000 students. But he and his new team will be operating under the weight of some long and heavy Yale traditions.
In his 1983 book Yale’s Residential Colleges: the First Fifty Years, the late Thomas G. Bergin wrote of the period between 1933 and 1941: “Obliging waitresses offered printed bills of fare (with optional entrees), food was served. with appropriate linen and silverware, .and the mores of the Thirties, as yet uncorrupted by the relaxed informality of returning veterans or the aggressive untidiness of the ‘hippie’ generation, assured proper dress.” A. Whitney Griswold, Yale’s President from 1950–1963, was so distressed at the collapse of dress conventions in the 1950s that he assigned “checkers” armed with a supply of neckwear to stand guard at all dining hall doors. Repeated offenses against the coat-and-tie rule could result in the loss of dining hall privileges.
Like so much else about the University, food service began to change dramatically after World War II. The waitresses are long gone, as are the bills of fare. Wearing a coat and tie has become a bold political statement risked by only a conservative few. Every evening for dinner, each dining hall has one vegetarian entree, one vegan, and two others. Half the halls serve one menu, the other half another, for a grand total of eight possible main courses for students. In addition to vegan and vegetarian offerings, kosher meals and other special menus are available on request.
As part of the 2.9 million meals it serves a year, Yale is now providing 1,200 bagels a week—in 14 flavors. There are 42 brands of cereal available at breakfast, and a total of 4,100 recipes, calling for 2,900 different ingredients.
The food is available under a variety of meal plans. The basic product is the Full Meal Plan (three a day, seven days a week, for $3,280). Then there is the Any 14 Meal Plan Plus Flex (which includes “flex” dollars that can be spent at local restaurants, for the same price as the Full Plan), and the Kosher Kitchen Meal Plan (administered by the Young Israel House at Yale and served at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life). Graduate students, who normally pursue more independent lives, are offered 12 meals a week for an annual fee of $2,925. The future may be taking shape in the “swing dorm,” the Tower Parkway building designed to accommodate a year’s population from each residential college as it is renovated. All the suites in the new dorm have kitchenettes of their own where students face no dining constraints at all.
Students can pay their dining hall bills the old-fashioned way through the bursar’s office, or with “Eli Bucks” purchased in blocks of $50 (after an initial investment of $300). According to the Dining Services brochure, the “Vending Services Debit Card is handy for those times when you’re out of coins and you just gotta have caffeine to stay awake for at least another hour.”
The process by which all of these raw materials are rendered into food and delivered to the customers is, according to Edward Ley, the manager of purchasing for dining services, “very complex.” Ordering is done five weeks ahead of time, and then reviewed, while food is delivered seven days a week from some of dining services’ 155 vendors. Some comes directly to the dining halls, but most of it is routed through a central commissary.
That facility is a warehouse at Long Wharf which, in the old days, housed a meat-processing operation. All the meat, fresh seafood, and fish still arrive there, but now the warehouse is used primarily for storage and distribution. Indeed, it’s the kind of place in which you might find, say, mind-boggling quantities of orange juice.
Precise figures about pounds of potatoes, or heads of lettuce, are hard to establish, but some rough amounts provide a sense of the scale of the purchasing effort: Yale students still carve their way through $3 million worth of meat each year; they consume $700,000 worth of produce and $600,000 in dairy products. The line item for bakery products is a robust $1 million. Altogether, food costs run to $7.5 million, while labor accounts for $10 million, much of it paid to union workers who earn between $11 and $22 an hour plus benefits.
The high-end wages may sound attractive, but the hours involved are tough. Take the baking crew, some of whose members start work at midnight. Others arrive a bit later, at 2:30 or 3, so that all the day’s baked goods can be shipped out of the central distribution point under Commons by 6:30 a.m.
Although the warren of rooms and walk-in refrigerators beneath Commons once served as the heart of dining services, the advent of more processed foods—such as salad mixes, or pre-chopped onions—means that the preparation of food has become more systematic. With their ingredients ready to go, the different teams and shifts at the dining halls simply come in and follow the recipes for lunch and dinner. Breakfast is Continental everywhere but Commons, where it’s still hot.
In recent years, the changes in student eating habits have often left some dining halls all but empty at peak-service hours. Assorted strategies have been devised to satisfy the elusive customers. A decade ago, dinner service ended at 6:45; now it ends at 8. Lunch service has been extended to 2:30. And with the addition of the “Speed Line” in Commons, there is no longer any pause between breakfast and the midday meal. Other innovations include “Chef’s Choice Entree” and “Kitchen Confections,” specially prepared gourmet offerings on alternating Thursday nights. The Student Cake Agency takes orders for special occasions, and a “bag meal” is available for students whose activities overlap with standard dining hall hours. “Just about any time of the day or night you can get food somewhere on the Yale campus,” declares the Dining Services brochure.
Whatever the appeal of these changes to the consumers, they have created a financial strain on the institution. The current cost of Yale’s food-service is roughly $20 million a year, and in the last fiscal year it operated $1.2 million in the red. University administrators have long predicted that the losses would continue to grow.
But any attempt to address these problems must take into account Yale’s traditionally bumpy relationship with its unions. While the dining services department’s 300 members of Local 35 of the Federation of University Employees have been enjoying a period of relative calm in the middle of a six-year contract, the arrival of Aramark has caused the union some concern. Bob Proto, president of Local 35, was quoted recently in the Yale Herald discussing a number of fears, the chief one being that “Yale may have a long-term plan of establishing another entity in the dining halls in the event of a labor dispute.”
Charles Long responded that the University would have to “play it by ear” as far as future changes in the department go. But Ernest Huff, the University’s director of student, financial, and administrative services, was firm in his position that Aramark’s arrival would have no negative impact on the unionized workers. “We have been up front about exactly what the engagement was,” he said.
Aramark and the University think they can negotiate an evolution that will please both the students and the unions. In response to a survey distributed to students in October, scrod, a Yale staple, was dropped from the menu. Administrators say operating hours and meal-plan requirements will be reviewed soon.
Regardless of the impact of the new management, serving food to nearly 10,000 students will remain a challenge, especially in the financial realm. “It’s very expensive,” says Long. “But we accept that as a cost of residential college life.” Meanwhile, the fare remains in a state of evolution. “We have to continue to innovate,” says Eric Uscinski. “We’re always trying to look ahead of the market and see what the next craze is.”  |
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