NC State revitalizes vet school’s café

A year ago, the café serving North Carolina State’s school of veterinary medicine was going to the dogs.

“It was a very old and out-of-date facility that kind of lived past its due life expectancy,” says Shawn Hoch, associate director for NC State Dining. “It was very limited. A lot of the equipment was out of date, there was really no flexibility and not a lot of revenue was produced there, which meant a small staffing model.”

Shuttering it was not an option because it sits on a campus with about a thousand staff and students located several miles from the main NC State campus and its array of dining choices. The only other dining venue in the area is a coffee shop in the complex’s hospital.

Furthermore, NC State’s veterinary school is one of the top such schools in the country and “it’s really important that we provide a competitive environment for them for the students they are trying to recruit,” Hoch explains.

The challenge therefore was to recreate the existing café space in a way that would allow it to operate efficiently but still offer an attractive menu.

Wolves Den offers a flexible menu at price points attractive to the Vet school's student body.

“It was very important for us that it still have a very small staffing footprint but [with] as much flexibility with the concept and the equipment [as possible],” Hoch says.

One solution was to utilize meal components already being produced for successful concepts at the main campus, such as smoked meats and salsas, “which we could satellite to this location to give it efficiencies,” Hoch explains. “Then we could focus on execution” at the café itself.

Those components could be used to make more customized and to-order dishes that would also solve another problem the old café had: waste.

Because of the staffing limitations and production equipment like fryers that necessitated a cook-to-inventory approach, the earlier cafe menu not only had a lot of fried foods but also leaned heavily on pre-wrapped items like burgers and biscuits that would sit in slides waiting for customers.

That not only compromised food quality but also generated waste if anticipated customer counts failed to show up.

The new menu is much more oriented toward cook-to-order, which not only reduces waste but also increases customer satisfaction. The new production equipment—hot/cold wells, induction cookers and a convection oven among them—also allow flexibility so the menu now can jump from Mediterranean one week to Asian the next to a diner concept after that.

“We have a large vegan and vegetarian population at the vet school, so we really needed to have more than veggie burgers,” Hoch says. “We wanted to be able to sauté and cook with different fresh vegetables and condiments to give customers flexibility.”

Price point is also important, he adds, because the students at the vet school are often financially squeezed, “so we needed something that was affordable but also valued.”

The café's name, meanwhile, was the result of a contest and was one that had been used at another now closed venue on campus until about three years ago. The graphics, which incorporate pawprints on the soffit of the façade, were designed in consultation with a professor at the university who is an expert on animal prints.

“We figured if we just put up any old prints and they were not appropriately sized or [realistic], we’d never hear the end of it,” Hoch laughs. More seriously, he adds, making that kind of effort on the details “also builds credibility.”

Even with the changes the customer counts aren’t huge, but no one expected them to be. Wolves Den is only open for breakfast and lunch during the week, generating about 110 covers a day.

“Our average customer, if they dine with us once a week, that’s on the high side,” Hoch admits. “They are on tight budgets, so while we’re hoping to grow that we’re also trying to be realistic. We understand this won’t be a financial driver for us. This is a strategic partnership.”

Contact Mike Buzalka at [email protected]

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