M

y ex-roommate, Brad Anderson '83, thinks I'm kidding. I've just invited him to lunch at our old dining hall at UNH. He reminds me we left campus and moved to Newmarket because of the UNH dining halls.

Things have supposedly changed, I tell Brad, adding that we'll represent a tough challenge to a dining system that has tried to remake itself. Brad is a long-time vegetarian; I, on the other hand, am an unabashed carnivore.

He denies himself cheap caloric desserts; I have to have cookies, lots of good cookies. Brad skips meals when he's on a working roll and gets ravenously hungry at odd hours. I've never skipped a meal and dine at the conventional, God-intended hours of 8, 12 and 6. I'm a little bit country; he's a little rock 'n roll. We're different, yes, but we have a common heritage: 20 years ago we fled the dining halls. It seems appropriate that we return, together.

Before D-day, however, I do a little research. Since 1997, the university has put a remarkable amount of energy and money into changing the face of UNH Dining. There is a new dining complex, Holloway Commons, which rises Kilimanjaro-like off the T-Hall end of Main Street and which opened its doors for the first time in September. A makeover of Stillings is complete, and in the coming years an already spiffed-up Philbrook will likely be the beneficiary of a major multi-million dollar overhaul. Meanwhile, the MUB is the relatively new home to a food court headlined by Godfather's Pizza and Taco Bell. One might wonder why the grand obsession with food, and Hospitality Services executive director David May '78 has two ready answers: one, it's important to students and two, the university had plenty of room for improvement.

This trend toward upscale campus food services is a national phenomenon. Wheaton College in Illinois offers fireside dining and a menu partnership with Bon AppŽtit; Boston College has "seven distinct student dining venues," including a Mexican Taqueria and an el fresco cafŽ with smoothies to go. Numerous schools, including UNH, offer special dining events to mark the holidays or emphasize regional flavor. Skeptics may wonder what potstickers and portabello mushroom burgers have to do with academic excellence, but in the increasingly competitive world of colleges and universities, prospective students and their parents can have their cake and eat it too. "We can't substitute for Mom's cooking," cautions May, careful not to let a bunch of recent awards and the thunderstruck expressions on the faces of a few hockey recruits get to his head. "But we'll keep trying."

On the stairwell to Stillings' second floor, the first thing Brad and I notice is the absence of lines. It's the noon hour on a fiercely blustery November day and the former scene of an anxious bottleneck of cranky, why-me students is now an effortless promenade. In the background a master chef in a white double-breasted smock strolls about purposefully. Shafts of sunshine pour through multiple skylights onto a produce-laden salad bar. Brad is about to drift off in the aromatic direction of a creamy clam chowder when assistant manager Deborah Scanlon offers a tour. "It was Swillings once, wasn't it," she admits. "Not anymore."

Indeed, Brad gawks like Charlie Bucket on his first visit to Willy Wonka's Gobstopper room: bread bowls here, three kinds of pizza there. The sunny, renovated Stillings is like a mini Faneuil Hall marketplace. An array of kiosk-style "display cooking" stations are center stage, with seating areas off to either side. Today's sandwich menu features rosemary-and-butter-brushed Reubens, while the hot entrŽe is teriyaki mahi mahi. Several members of the football team, evidently unable to restrain themselves until the traditional noon lunch hour, are already finished. "You don't have to wait for lunch to eat lunch," explains Scanlon, noting that the dining hall hours are now continuous, which means a calorie-starved fullback with a hankering for a smoked turkey on sourdough can be made happy anytime between the hours of 9 a.m. and 10 p.m.

Seemingly the lone interior vestige of the past is the soft-serve ice cream machine. Yes, it's still here, says Scanlon, wearily anticipating our question, but there are no cones anymore. Apparently there was some ice cream mischief--Scanlon thinks it may have been our generation--involving mailboxes, and target practice on a wall outside. "Well, they've been off the menu ever since," she adds.

For a moment, we are taken aback. Her chefs will provide thick creamy batter for make-your-own Belgian waffles and entrust sushi-ordering 18-year-olds with enough wasabi to set their mouth afire, but the tasteless, featherweight wafer cone is verboten? We suggest that perhaps it is time to trust our young future leaders once again now that the bar has been raised, culinary tastes refined and behavior suitably modified. No, she says, the cones aren't coming back. "You had cones when you were here?" asks Jen Williams, a junior volleyball player on her solemn, empty-handed way to class. "No way!" Way.

Students, and alumni, can be finicky people. Stillings, with its rustic hand-carved market signs, was the crucial first phase of the campus-wide dining overhaul that had in mind winning over the seemingly unwinnable--the student body. Perhaps advantageously, May, the plan's architect, was one of those students himself, having had his fill of Philbrook back in the mid 70s.

After graduating, May pursued a career in food service, working in several senior positions for Marriott before coming back to UNH in 1997. When he took a tour of the dining halls, he realized with some alarm that not much had changed. There were long lines at Stillings, a dour cafeteria ambience and a disturbing sense that students were eating there because there was no other option. In early 1998, reserves from the UNH Dining budget were allocated to refashion Stillings and the work began that summer. When the renovation was finished, the administrative staff was reminded of the "Field of Dreams" mantra: "If you build it they will come." Student usage doubled in part because it was new and in part because waiting lines were virtually eliminated with the new open-floor layout. The trademark din was muted with new soundproofing materials, as well.

On the more subtle culture front, May tried numerous things, including a new language. The student wasn't the *&#! student but a guest (and a regular one at that). The dining hall was a distinct dining venue with specialty shops. The entrance became the "front of the house" in May-speak and pointy-hatted chefs like Ralph Coughenour "performers." May insists that food service is entertainment: "At Stillings for the first time you got to sit and watch the show." Many of the changes were meant to enhance the employee morale, which it has, but May's department also came up with a rallying cry that was both universal and easy to remember for everyone else. The slogan: "Real. Good. Food. Now!"

Among last November's memos tacked to large bulletin boards near the dishwashing conveyor belt was one displaying a schematic diagram of a slice of pepperoni pizza, complete with labels pointing to "Cooked" and "Uncooked" sections. "Ms. Fruity" lobbies for a fresher, more diverse fruit selection, decrying the condition of the kiwi and honeydew melon. "Fruit is a food group just like vegetables but they aren't equally served," she protested.

Replying to the daily onslaught at Stillings falls to senior area manager Art Main, a genial bear of a man, who replies with both vigor and withering wit. (Philbrook's Richard LeHoullier and Holloway's Jon Plodzik '89 respond as well.) Lately they have been hearing from a few students pining for the return of cream cheese jalapeno poppers and carrot cake. Periodically students wonder about leftovers and recycling: the word there is that all paper refuse and food scraps are ground up for Kingman Farm's compost heap. Breakfast cereals are a perpetual hot topic. The managers constantly reassure students they are doing their best to be fair and balanced, but for the time being they will continue to offer an assortment of 24 fine cereals. "Cookie Crisp" will not crack the starting lineup. Not now, maybe not ever.

The Marketplace at Stillings--a virtual "feeding machine" with twice as many dinner patrons (2,000) as its Swillings forerunner--was but a warm-up for the Mecca of grazing, Holloway Commons, a 70,000-square-foot dining emporium offering everything from hand-tossed, brick oven pizzas (think Bertucci's, not Ellio's) to shrimp pad thai. The Commons serves up to 35,000 meals per week, with the millionth brick oven pizza slice to be tossed any time now. For those not on a dining plan, a satellite cyber cafŽ called "with Panache" offers Au Bon Pain-style goodies and sandwiches. It's hard to be understated about Holloway--the newest must-see for visiting prospective students and parents--and May, its enabler, is not. "I've seen a lot of places and I honestly think we have one of the best places in the country--if not the world," he says.

State-of-the-art design stretches from entrance to exit. Hand scanners, using lasers and complicated algorithmic formulas, are used in concert with Social Security numbers to verify meal plan patrons. It's a fantasy land of trendy, vibrantly colored free-standing food stations, sun-stroked cafŽ tables and an urbane-looking staff garbed in jaunty chef hats and loose fitting eggplant-colored smocks. A counterclockwise journey brings you past the vaunted pizza oven and the burger grill to the Euro Kitchen with its curvy countertop and more sophisticated tableau of squashes and baked entrŽes. Turn the next corner and you are greeted by the bustling stir fry station with its dueling woks and the "fire and ice" themed sizzling salad bar. You can eat your food amidst the sights and sounds of the marketplace, or retreat to the panoramic rotunda where you can watch the vagaries of a Durham winter slip by.

What the students don't see is the netherworld of food pulpers and hot washers, great stainless steel ovens, bath-sized crock pots, and a grove of fry-o-laters. A secret elevator behind the Euro Kitchen counter rumbles morning, noon and night to the notice of no one, bringing with it a pork loin here and a steaming cauliflower soup there.

Ultimately the arbiters of whether Holloway Commons is worth the hefty $26.4 million construction loan are the students, who pay for it (and all other operating costs) with their dining fee. On a November night two days before Thanksgiving I'm joined by one of the more aggressive segments of the food-consuming student body--an athletic team, specifically the men's and women's swim team. As they arrive from a two-hour- plus practice, they fan out hungrily, the purest test of the promise of, you know, "Real. Good. Food. Now!" Some swimmers head for hearty fare, but two at my table opt for plain bagels. A third gets the tuna casserole.

I must look heartsick, because freshman Jahnel McGarry feels compelled to explain that she's hungry, and she doesn't like to wait. The Euro Kitchen looks a tad exotic with its orange squash and rosemary-garnished oven roast. The stir fry and salad bar are nice but either might require a wait. Nobody, repeats her sophomore teammate Amy Roberts, wants to wait. So they're sticking with plain old cold bagels. Actually, Roberts has in mind a toasted bagel, an excellent bang-for-your-buck choice timewise, but even that is an unanticipated adventure. On this cruel evening, her extra fat Finagle-a-Bagel gets hung up in the toaster oven and a small fire erupts. I find Roberts looking around, half amused, half scared, muttering, "Um, I think I need some help here. My bagel's on fire. Somebody?"

So the Holloway experience isn't perfect. You can't please everyone all the time, says May, and students preparing their own, or for that matter choosing their own, is a task not without risks. Students by and large aren't sophisticated eaters and many, say the swimmers, fall prey to what is akin to the Dark Side for them, the grill and brick oven pizza area. Which brings up a question: Should UNH take a more restrictive approach knowing that obesity is on the rise nationally and the "Freshman 15" is a growing problem?

"A friend of mine on the swim team gained 25 pounds last year," says Roberts. "She came from a strict household nutrition-wise and when she got here she just couldn't help herself." Another frosh swimmer, Meghann MacCurrach, says she'd welcome a selective trimming of the 75-item strong menu, starting with, say, the chocolate molten cake. "I'm from Florida, I like to eat healthy," MacCurrach says, "but if all these unhealthy options are there I have a hard time passing them. I don't think it's necessary to not offer desserts, just limit them."

May acknowledges that food education is a crucial issue. The university employs a nutritionist who offers counseling and publishes a raft of materials on nutrition and proper eating habits, but she can't police 6,000 student diners. Art Main, over at Stillings, concurs that overeating is a problem and needs to be dealt with. On the other hand there is an improving vegan menu and other wholesome natural food alternatives, and Art himself has kept to a popular low carb diet while eating at the dining hall and has lost 38 pounds.

Many students say Holloway is nice place to eat, pretty and all with its contemporary design and fiesta dishware, and superbly multi-faceted. But not everybody is smitten, and some students practice their critical thinking skills by complaining about the entranceway hand-scanner, or the cost of a meal plan (the cheapest is $75 per week). Other complaints trend toward more generalized grousing. A rare few even long for, yes, the retro dining halls of yore. "With Philbrook, everything's right there," writes Ken Gagnon '06 in a November issue of the New Hampshire. "With Holloway, I need rations and a pack mule to get to the Stir Fry section."

As visiting alumni, it's frankly hard to understand that there's even a little bit of unhappiness with the brave new dining order. At Stillings, Brad enjoyed several helpings of clam chowder and I inhaled a Reuben. We liked what we saw and loved what we ate. The hand-carved signs were homey, the staff friendly, and Brad found the bread bowls a thrilling novelty--up until his fourth helping of hot chowder, which breached the overtaxed crust and began to rapidly swamp his plate. Towels and quick action became necessary to spare a table-wide evacuation.

Though he declared himself sated to the point of needing a nap, Brad reluctantly decided it was time, in the honorable tradition of student-dining activism, to write a helpful napkin note. "Altho I am a well-travelled, rather over well-seasoned, maturish man of the world," he wrote, "I can say honestly that today I have had my very first experience with the fabled 'bread bowl.' I think you need rugged-er ones. Either that, or the chowder should not be so good that I am filling a single bowl four times. Signed, Over 40." A day later, Art Main ribbed Brad in return: "Look at all that money spent to educate you, and you never learned that a bread bowl is a single-service one-time eatable entrŽe." Brad took it well. No doubt the next generation of UNH graduates will be better educated. ~

Todd Balf '83 is a former senior editor for Outside magazine, and writes for Men's Journal, Fast Company and other publications. He is the author of two books, The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-la, and The Darkest Jungle: The True Story of the Darien Expedition and America's Ill-Fated Race to Connect the Seas. He lives in Beverly, Mass.