Starting this January, students eating at the Arrillaga Family Dining Commons have seen new dishes and a more dynamic menu. The changes have been a long time coming. Months of contract negotiations and policy changes have now allowed the team to better meet students’ culinary demands, according to staff and chefs at the dining hall.
A key shift has been facilitating greater flexibility in making adjustments to the menu. Staff now have more independence to choose ingredients in the purchasing system, according to Associate Director of Student Dining Culinary Programs Mychel Brewster. The team behind each food station within a dining hall has also gained the ability to make changes to the online menu portal.
The shift has “free[d] up our culinary team to be really creative,” said Khalil Wells, director of student dining. “We can make changes week to week…We can do things day to day.”
The chefs have also renegotiated contracts to free up the budget for greater variety and higher-quality dishes. The team “[gave vendors] our standards and then [made] them essentially bid against each other,” said Brewster. The process required daily meetings from June to August last year, he said, but has made contracts cheaper overall. As a result, the team has been able to serve new foods such as New York steak and gelato.
“A lot of students are like, ‘Why all of a sudden?’… but for us it was months in the works,” he said.
But some things never change. Chefs always try to keep an even spread between healthy and indulgent foods, for example. According to staff, it’s a balancing act that involves everything from portion sizes to the layout of food stations.
Sous Chef Heidi Mitchell highlighted the focus on preserving options for students to make their own health choices: “If you want to be indulgent, we have the perfect quantity of gelato for you to indulge in,” she said. That said, the team tries to make it easy to make the nutritional choice. “The salad bar is the first thing you see when you enter a dining hall… right out there in the front to help guide students towards healthier choices,” said Wells.
Even for more indulgent foods, the chefs make sure they’re high-quality, Brewster said. The pizza, for example, uses flour from Italy and dough that has been fermented for 48 hours. The salmon is imported from Scotland and cold-smoked.
“We’ve also put a lot of care into the healthy options that are available and not just overlooked those,” Mitchell said.
According to Wells, keeping up with students’ needs is a constant cycle. “Trends change, and students’ palates change,” he said.
Having worked with Stanford Dining since he was 15, Wells has seen students’ tastes shift towards healthier and more sophisticated menu items. To this end, the team solicits input through channels including a text line, student dining committee, weekly office hours and fall survey. Student ideas have inspired real changes: for example, specials now run longer than they did before. Wells and his colleagues are currently trying to find the perfect amount of oil to use in their dishes based on posts from Fizz.
“ The ultimate goal of these changes is to improve the student experience, improve student satisfaction,” he said. “ We play a very small part in the experience that a student has at Stanford, but we want it to be memorable.”