PHASING OUT THE FRYER

By Anne Danahy

UNIVERSITY PARK — Goodbye Wonder Bread and hello roasted Roma tomatoes.

The menus at Penn State have choices that would please a foodie whose vocabulary doesn’t include fast or frozen.

“Because our clients are more sophisticated, we have to keep up with that,” said Jim Richard, manager of South Food district, where students can buy loose leaf teas or burritos. “They expect to have choices here, and their parents do too.”

Hamburgers and pizzas are still options on campus, but today so are garlic roasted pork loin with red pepper coulis, custom-blended teas, authentic Mexican food and fresh-baked bread.

Penn State and universities across the country are phasing out traditional cafeterias in favor of cozier, bistro-like settings, and offering restaurant- quality food ranging from vegan dishes to gourmet pizza.

A $14.5 million upgrade gave the University of Massachusetts at Amherst a dining facility that offers a deli and sushi bar, a pasta stand and an Asian noodle shop. Bowdoin University, which regularly ranks at the top of Princeton Review’s

In fall 2008, Penn State Housing and Food Services made …

• 3,210 dozen large cookies

• 31,640 dozen small cookies

• 8,000-9,000 dinners a night

• 92,000 meals a week

“Best Campus Food” list, hosts a lobster bake for students each year, and routinely offers choices such as nacho bars and vegan stations. Yale is spotlighting organic foods and even creating organic mini-farms.

Lisa Wandel, director of Penn State residential dining, said the university wants to give students choices and respond to what they want. In fall 2008, a student survey showed those wants included Mexican food and healthy eating.

“It’s important to Food Services and the university that we continue to update our program and concepts to meet our students’ wants and needs, whether it’s more healthy dining options, longer hours, later hours, convenient carry-out, organic grocery items, or authentic Mexican food,” Wandel said.

So in the fall, the menu at Simmons Dining Hall switched to all-healthy eating. At Findlay Commons, students can dine at “Sol de Cobre.” The Mexican menu there was developed by the staff after a food preparer was sent to a culinary workshop in Monterrey, Mexico. And students and staff on campus can pick up organic and natural food at Sisu, the Waring Commons convenience store.

Food Services is on a self-sustaining budget, so it has to break even. While the healthy dishes offered at Simmons are more labor-intensive, Wandel said they’re getting adjusted and keeping costs in line.

“We were afraid the food would be more expensive, but because we’re making things from scratch, they’re not,” she said.

Another method of lowering costs is reducing meat serving sizes slightly, which is also in keeping with healthy dining.

After a shaky start at Sisu and some resistance at Simmons, the changes are a success. Students voted Simmons the No. 1 dining hall out of six last fall, and sales are up at Sisu.

“We probably never should have put ‘healthy’ in the title,” Wandel said of the early efforts to publicize Simmons’ new menu.

On a recent afternoon, traffic was steady at Simmons where students could have Glenn Byers, a Simmons employee and university sophomore, custom make either a wrap stuffed with Caribbean chicken or baked sesame tofu.

“Would you like more tofu with that?” he asked one student.

Diners could also cut themselves a piece of fresh baked bread — sourdough or raisin that day, to go with six homemade soups, Greek salad with olives and feta cheese, grilled vegetables, lunch from the huge salad bar and a mini cookie or apple spice cake for dessert.

“We have no fryers. We took our fryers out,” said assistant manager Rosetta Webster.

Brittany Kofsky, a sophomore in public relations, was there for the homemade chicken soup.

“I always stop here coming back from the gym,” Kofsky said. “I really like it. It’s good to get healthy food on campus.”

Freshman Chris Daly was eating grilled cheese on wheat, a Caribbean chicken wrap, along with a banana and pudding for dessert. He said he expected good food when he came to Penn State, in part because of the climbing tuition. But the home-cooked food in Simmons is actually better than he expected.

“It was a pleasant surprise,” he said.

“It’s nice to have a good variety,” said Mike Russo, a freshman in finance. “Pizza, hamburgers, French fries get old after a while.”

Simmons Manager Karen Henderson said the menus meet the needs of vegan and vegetarian customers too.

Simmons has bent some of the healthy-only rules. Soda made its way back into the drink choices and a few toppings are offered for the no-sugar added ice cream, sherbet and frozen yogurt.

“That was another concession — we brought back sprinkles,” Henderson said.

Mark Kraner, president of National Association of College and University Food Services, said the data show that today’s students are used to eating at fine restaurants.

“If I went out to dinner with my parents, I was lucky if it was McDonald’s. They’ve eaten at three or four-star restaurants,” he said.

At George Mason University, where Kraner is assistant vice president for university services, students can dine on pizza made in the wood stone oven Kraner had installed.

“I’ll put it up against any pizza in town,” he said.

Kraner said many of these trends have been building for the past 10 years. That includes vegetarian and vegan offerings, healthy foods and other choices. While there had always been healthy food next to other foods, Kraner said, now healthy food is given its own focus.

Along with the fine foods, the presentation is getting more sophisticated. Increasingly, university and college dining rooms aren’t filled with long cafeteria tables, Kraner said. Instead there are booths and bistro tables for eating in groups or alone. The food is presented well, rather than in a table full of steaming pans.

Chef demonstrations are also in demand at Penn State and other universities. In addition to the demos every night at dinner, students at Penn State can sign up for cooking classes, such as a recent one in Cajun cooking. Good eating is such a popular topic among students, Wandel said, that the Food Network was added to the university cable offerings.

Penn State also has a convenience store that offers only organic and natural foods and will receive national recognition at an upcoming industry conference. Jennifer Krise, who runs it, said when Food Services made the switch from a convenience store with a few all-natural offerings to Sisu Store and Coffee Bar in the fall, it was a “rough transition.” A Facebook page encouraged students to boycott Sisu, which no longer offered Hot Pockets.

Now, sales are steady. In fact, this semester, sales at Sisu have been higher eight of 11 weeks compared with the same time last year. Offering samples of the food for sale, Krise said, was the key to overcoming the resistance. Along with potato chips, there are frozen pizzas, cookies, ice cream and crackers.

“We have pretty much everything a normal store would have,” she said.

There’s even a nut grinder that lets customers make their own nut butter to have in sandwiches, along with jellies from the local Tait Farm. And if Back to Nature brand Fudge Striped Cookies aren’t what a student wants, Krise said there are still plenty of places to buy standard snack food.

“If you have to have your Mountain Dew and Doritos, go upstairs,” she said. “We’re not going to stop you.”

Prices are the same or only slightly higher for all-natural products. Certified organic foods tend to be more expensive.

Blake Standlick, a freshman in pre-medicine, picked up an organic yogurt parfait with strawberries.

“At first I thought it was a little strange, and I was unsure if I really wanted organic food,” Standlick said.

But now she likes the food there.

“It’s really not more expensive and it tastes the same,” she said.

Anne Danahy can be reached at 231-4648.