Come and get it-- Specialty restaurants serve menus from around the world

By Craig Chamberlain

It's Friday evening and a line of students is waiting patiently outside a
local eating establishment. The specialty here is Mexican, obvious by the
aroma of the food and a few small decorating touches - pinatas hanging from
the ceiling, bullfighting posters on the walls. The room is darkened, and
the tables are lit by small white candles.

These UI students will be eating fajitas, guacamole and refried beans this
evening, but they just as easily could have gone Italian at the Italian
Kitchen or had do-it-yourself Chinese at a place called Wok on the Wild
Side - and all without spending a dime or leaving the campus housing
system. Or, for only $2.75 and a reservation, they could have sampled the
French fare on campus at the R.O. Bistro.

On Wednesdays, they have other choices: the Pizza Parlor, the Fresh Catch
for fish, or Don's, promoted as a place where "decadence abounds," diets
are ignored and the wait, for good reason, is always an hour.

Every other Thursday they can try African-American dishes such as neck
bones, black-eyed peas and breaded buffalo fingers at Soul Ingredient, and
on Sunday afternoons, they can get a taste of English tea and the amenities
at the Scone and Spoon Tea Room, complete with live classical harp music.

It all comes with the room-and-board contract for the more than 8,000
undergraduates in the UI residence halls. One evening a week - except at
Soul Ingredient and the R.O. Bistro - these specialty restaurants
substitute for the regular fare and atmosphere in selected residence hall
dining rooms on campus. Students can eat either in their own residence
halls or head across campus to sample the choices.

The dining halls that double as these restaurants are still obviously
dining halls; the facilities are dressed up but not transformed. Yet the
staff adds a lot of small touches that make a difference. At the Italian
Kitchen, it's student servers on the line in white shirts and black bow
ties, the display showing the different kinds of pasta and bread, the
checkered tablecloths, the olive oil for dipping bread, and the music of
Frank Sinatra on the sound system.

The restaurants - almost all of them created in the last two years - are
the work of a "very creative" and "kind of crazy" staff, said Maria Ramos,
director of university food services. The creativity naturally comes out
over meals, she said. "We generally eat lunches together - all of my
central staff - and that's when we come up with all these strange ideas."

Since the UI housing system is self-supporting, and the student residents
are very much customers, the staff also is thinking in terms of business,
Ramos said. "We're here to do just one thing, and do one thing right," she
said, "and that is to make sure that . our customers are satisfied
customers and are getting what they want."

But the restaurants also are an obvious outgrowth of Ramos' own curiosity
and adventurousness when it comes to her favorite subject: food. Much of it
comes from the diversity of her roots: She is part Chinese, Filipino and
Spanish, and spent summers as a child in Japan. Her attitude clearly is
that one lives to eat rather than vice versa.

"I love food, I just really love all kinds of food," she said. "That's what
I like to do outside of my work here, I like to eat. I like to go all over
the place to eat. When I went to Paris last year, that's all I did."

The first residence hall specialty restaurant, called Reservations Only,
was started in 1983 and offered a variety of gourmet cooking. In fall 1992,
after Ramos' return from Paris, it became R.O. Bistro and exclusively French.

At the time this first restaurant was started, "we had a lot of talent on
the residence halls staff, and yet we weren't using it," she said. "We got
into this daily grind of serving three meals a day."

A few more restaurants were added over the next few years, but the majority
came into being only recently. The restaurants were only possible because
they were incorporated into plans for the necessary remodeling of the
dining halls, Ramos said. They had to wait for the remodeling work to be
finished.

In addition to the ethnic fare for dinner, three choices also are available
every day for both lunch and dinner. Students can cook their own
hamburgers, hot dogs, bratwurst and other meat outside, year-round, at The
Grill. For subs and other sandwiches, there's Scott's New York Deli.  And
for students who wish to avoid all meat or all animal products, there's the
Field of Greens.

Yet another two dinner choices were added last November: Lemongrass serves
Thai food, which Ramos cooks herself, every other Wednesday and La Creperie
offers crepes and galettes every other Thursday.

The UI residence halls are not unique in offering these types of
restaurants, though other schools that offer them have one or two, rather
than a dozen, Ramos said. "And I think we're the only institution that has
restaurants, specialty dining, as part of the regular board plan. Most
schools charge a premium for them," usually treating them as cash
operations, she said.

Cost is not a problem, Ramos said. "Yes, it costs us a little bit more as
far as the food items themselves - for some of them; some of them, no.  But,
in the long-run, as far as overall costs . we live within the budgets that
we've projected.

"It costs us more in food, but it doesn't cost us anything extra in labor."
The added variety is a welcome challenge for much of the staff, giving them
a greater sense of pride in their work and experience that might be useful
in the future in places other than college dining halls, she said. The
result is higher productivity.

And the important thing, Ramos said, is customer satisfaction and support.
More than 25 percent of residence hall meals are eaten in the specialty
restaurants, she said. "The students really like it, and that encourages
us, and so we keep opening up more."

(Faculty and staff members and their guests may purchase meal tickets
for lunch or dinner from the front office of any residence hall.)