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Once complete, Lakeside
Dining Hall will offer students an entirely new
dining hall experience with more open space and
stations where they can choose different food
selections. |
After more than five years of planning, Lakeside Dining
Hall is being upgraded and restored from its original
1960s vintage to a modern, culturally diverse facility
to serve hundreds more of Oswego’s students.
Director of Resident Dining Craig Traub and his Auxiliary
Services staff are looking forward to the completion
of the new facility, as it will offer students a whole
new dining experience.
“The servery will be very different in that it
will be stations,” Traub said.
Compared to the current dining halls on campus that
operate on a straight cafeteria line system, Lakeside’s
stations will separate foods into categories like pizza
and pasta, entrées of the day and deli, salad,
fresh fruit, soup and desserts.
According to Traub, a large oval station located in
the center of the dining room will serve salad, fresh
fruit, soup and desserts from the bakeshop.
“We are trying to emphasize fresh fruit, fresh
vegetables and fresh baked goods,” he said. “We
think we’re going to be able to keep things a
lot more replenished and in a more appealing, appetizing
manner.”
Traub is most excited about a station that will serve
breakfast items in the morning, grilled items like chicken
and hamburgers for lunch, and Asian cuisine, like stir-fry,
for dinner.
Lakeside Dining Hall will serve up to 340 students with
the Asian cuisine being the specialty for the building.
Currently, Cooper Dining Hall is home to the ice cream
shop and Littlepage Dining Hall offers made to order
fresh salads and pizza.
“We are trying to encourage people to go to different
dining halls,” Traub said.
The building, more than 50 years old, is in its first
stages of renovation to update electrical, heating and
plumbing systems.
“A lot of energy is going into upgrading the physical
structure,” Traub said.
Other upgrades include all new walk-in refrigerators
and freezers, the food stations, and the entire north
window wall looking out onto Lake Ontario, which is
being replaced with modern windows.
The dining room will also be remodeled with all new
lighting and carpeting and will be decorated using a
water theme with different shades of blues.
The kitchen will also undergo a new design.
“We are going to open up the kitchen to the entire
operation, so people can see what we’re doing,”
Traub said.
Also, the dish room will be relocated near the exit
door so that students no longer have to walk through
the dining room traffic to clear their trays.
In order to make Lakeside more customer friendly, students
will first get their cold food including salad, then
their hot food just before sitting down.
“We’re trying to flip that in hopes of having
a better opportunity to keep hot food hotter,”
Traub said.
Students will no longer be responsible for clearing
their own trays. A conveyor belt will send the trays
to an employee, behind the scenes, who will clear the
silverware and paper items before cleaning them.
“It’s not a good ending to a meal when you
have to scrape your plate,” Traub said. “We
think it’s important from a customer standpoint.”
Lakeside Dining Hall is scheduled to reopen in August.
—Emily King ’05 |
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To March 2007 E-Newsletter |
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