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UMass Amherst upgrades dining facilities

AMHERST Mass. In an attempt to better compete with other upscale universities and colleges for student admissions in the northeast, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst recently unveiled the Berkshire Dining Commons, a brand-new foodservice facility that took nearly nine months and $14 million to complete.

The project, one of four dining facilities on the campus, is the university’s first major renovation in about 40 years, is located in a 50,000-square-foot-space and features seating for 800. It reopened during the Labor Day weekend.

Open daily, from 11 a.m. to midnight, the Dining Commons serves 6,500 meals a day and offers 11 restaurant-quality concepts, including a grill station, a deli and sushi bar, international food, a bakery cafe, a pasta stand and an Asian noodle shop.

This definitely is not your grandparents’ or even your parents’ college cafeteria experience, says Ken Toong, the university’s director of dining and retail food services.

"It is like a restaurant with 11 kitchens," he said. We went to probably 20 schools across the country to research this project," Toong said. "We went to Boston college, to Tufts University, North Carolina at Chappell Hill, Stanford and U.C. Berkeley. They all had recent renovations done and we wanted to learn from them, ask the tough questions about what was working and what was not."

According to Toong and executive chef Willie Sng, the goal was to create an atmosphere for the U. Mass students where they could find good food served in a place that caters to a better quality of life. If they didn't achieve the goal they surmised the students would take their foodservice needs off campus.

"We definitely wanted to keep them here," Toong said, "so the food has to be good. The meal plan is mandatory for the first two years, but it's optional for the third and fourth. We have a total of 25,000 students on campus and more than half of them are on the meal plan. In the last two years we have continued to improve the quality here. Back in 1999 we had 8,900 students on the plan and last year we had 12,500. This year it's 13,000 even though enrollment has been flat for the last few years. We've had less students by design; we kept admission lower in order to retain better students."

Toong added that the university's dining offerings are a good way to attract those better students.

"We use it as a way to recruit them," he said. "We feel with this nice Dining Commons, we have the edge, particularly since students are eating later than ever before. Now they can come in anywhere from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. to eat and then come back again later with friends - sometimes with their whole floor from the dorm - bring their laptops, sit together and have a meal or drink."

He also noted that the cost of the plan is $3,000 per year, which averages about $6.50 to $6.75 a meal, "a pretty good deal if they eat every meal on campus, very inexpensive."

Toong said the price of the meal plan has increased annually about 3 percent to 4 percent, including in 2006.

For architect Brian Amaral, creating the right atmosphere while being cost-efficient was key, particularly because of fluctuating energy prices.

"The school is very energy conscious to begin with so we created what we call daylight harvesing lighting," he said. "If there is a lot of natural light in the building, the lights will dim, conserving energy during that time. And at night the lights dim to create a restaurantlike setting, a whole different atmosphere. Last year [the school] had to pay for actual footage and this year for actual usage, which is more expensive. That will give them more incentive to be very careful."

In keeping with a restaurant theme, Toong also has implemented restaurant night once a week. The program brings local restaurateurs onto the campus, where their menus are recreated and the students get to sample some of their wares.

"We feature different restaurants every week," he said. "We work with the restaurant owners and chefs, asking them to send us three or four signature items, including appetizers, entrees and desserts, and our chef prepares them for that particular evening. Essentially it's their recipes and our chef supervises the preparation. Plus, our servers wear the same uniforms as the servers do in the [respective] restaurants. We believe that if our students eat here seven days a week, 30 weeks a year, we've got to give them variety or else they'll get bored."

Toong said he is very excited for the future of U. Mass's dining program, which already has garnered recognition at the National Association of College and University Food Services' Loyal Horton Dining Awards for the last three years.

"In the past our food was always very good," he said, "but now with the reopening we've pushed it to the next level."

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