Hello, my name is Emily! I am finishing my last year as a Biology major at St. Ambrose University, a small Catholic university in Davenport, Iowa. Other than a semester spent at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, I have lived on campus for all four years, and at St. Ambrose, on campus students are required to have a meal plan.
When I got to Ambrose, I was actually pretty pleased with the Cafeteria. It is located in Cosgrove Hall, the freshman dorm, and was only 22 stairs away! The hours were a little annoying: I tended to have classes straight over lunch on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and dinner is over at 6:30, except on Fridays, when they close half an hour earlier. However, it was a huge improvement over the high school cafeteria, and offered choices of Italian- and Asian-influenced cuisine (amongst other things) every day, so I found it pleasing. Possibly its best feature, of course, is the soft-serve ice cream machine, which can be used to fill a large coffee mug for future enjoyment… but at least at first I liked the entire place.
Sometime the next year, however, I made a discovery. The Monte Cristo sandwich and stir fried beef which made up my eclectic dinner tasted just like each other. What’s more, they tasted just like the chicken noodle soup I had for lunch, and the spaghetti alfredo I had the previous day. Sure, tequila shrimp was still excellent, but it is spicy-hot shrimp and rice with bacon, and one simply cannot go wrong with shrimp, bacon, and rice. The problem is whatever oil they use to keep things from sticking to every cooking surface. Honestly, they might be better off letting things stick. It would change up the flavor base.
There are other things that the Cafeteria does quite well. Bananas foster (bananas in syrup over vanilla ice cream) is a clear favorite despite the problems they have keeping the 5 gallon buckets of ice cream from melting. Hamburgers are a safe choice, and the salad bar, nacho bar, and cold-cuts bar allow for nearly infinite variations. Chicken nuggets are a perennial favorite, and although I personally never eat them, they please me because on chicken nugget day, the line forms in that area and I never have to wait for anything else. Made-to-order omelets and wraps are usually delicious but made-to-order stir-fry or pasta contains almost as much grease as actual food. Either way, anything made-to-order requires a long wait.
Possibly the single best cafeteria meal is the Midnight Breakfast. This is a finals week activity each semester, and is usually themed and involves door prizes and a raffle. Professors are solicited as “lunch ladies” and breakfast is served starting at 10 p.m. The line by this point is usually quite ridiculous, winding around the elevator, down the stairs (the main doors are locked at 7 p.m.), around the student commons, and when temperatures are not too cold, outside and through the courtyard. The meal is an excellent social free-for-all, all-you-can-eat of all the traditional American breakfast foods, including (but not limited too): donuts, omelets, hash-browns, waffles, grapefruit, cereal, coffee, hot cocoa, oranges, biscuits and gravy, and ice-cream.
I now live in “preferred housing,” which means that I have my own kitchen in addition to my meal plan. I sometimes grab cafeteria food before work or after my Cell Bio lab (if they ever say anything about an E. coli outbreak at our cafeteria, I swear it wasn’t me…), but mostly I cook for myself. It may not be as easy as running over to the cafeteria, but it has its advantages: I can cook what I like, I can eat in the middle of the night if I want, I always know exactly what went into it, and if it’s raining, I never get wet on my way to my meal.
For more information about the campus dining services at St. Ambrose University check out this link:
http://web.sau.edu/foodservice/
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