The Restaurants at Woodland, Indiana University, Bloomington

At the start of the fall 2013 semester, the 1,000-resident Forest Hall within the southeast neighborhood of the Indiana University Bloomington campus got a new addition: The Restaurants at Woodland. Creating a culinary-focused, presentation-style dining destination offering a variety of options was the goal for the residential neighborhood.

At the start of the fall 2013 semester, the 1,000-resident Forest Hall within the southeast neighborhood of the Indiana University Bloomington campus got a new addition: The Restaurants at Woodland. Creating a culinary-focused, presentation-style dining destination offering a variety of options was the goal for the residential neighborhood. The closure of a few outdated dining venues in the area allowed planning teams to build the new space, which houses nine restaurant concepts and seats 855 across four dining rooms and two outdoor terraces. The dining outlet gives the southeast neighborhood “a lot of upgrades in every sense of the word, [along with] some new options that they just haven’t had,” explains Chris Frank, marketing manager for dining. “We really felt like we wanted to do something that was much more advanced and more cutting edge.” 

The densely wooded area of Bloomington served as the design inspiration for The Restaurants at Woodland, keeping sustainable features and pursuit of LEED Certification high on the priority list. “Really the whole area is naturally a woodland, forest-type of ecosystem [and] on our campus trees are very, very important—so much so that buildings are built around trees,” Frank explains. “When it comes to the design, there are, in very tasteful ways, elements of wood and branches and leaves and things like that. Some of the things that stand out to me are some of the finishes on the lighting and the edges of the tables and in the carpet patterns. You see things that look like wood or are wood and there are live plants in all of the dining rooms. There are [also] booths [with] frosted glass [panels] in between some of them, and sort of melted inside the glass are these skinny branches and twigs and you can see that it’s actual wood. And of course there’s a lot of natural light so you get to see those colors really well.”

“We wanted it to be a dining destination,” Frank explains. “We wanted there to be lots of comfortable seating and we paid a lot of attention to the design so that it was anything but an industrial feel. There are circular booths, comfortable seating [and] unique lighting, so when you go from one dining area to the next it’s different. [There are] fireplaces and some things that are a little bit more modern, and we also made sure there are lots of electrical outlets, and not just down on the ground, but when you sit down, there’s the outlet right there for you. It’s such a part of what students need.”

“It’s great to see the students just camping out there, whether they’re doing it for social reasons or just camping out that sort of thing,” Frank shares. “It happens all the time cause they feel like they’re in a restaurant that’s semi-private and they’re in their own booth. They spread out all their books and their laptop and they’re there for hours. Maybe they’ll eat lunch and then just keep working through the afternoon. That’s been really great to see it as a destination.”

“What we call presentation-style cooking has been very, very important to us,” Frank explains. “As a customer, when you walk up you can see people cutting up the kiwi that’s going to go in your yogurt or you see people grilling the burger or you see them doing the stir-fry because they’re facing you, so there’s a lot of things that are visibly cooked and prepared in front of the customer. It’s more labor-intensive and more complicated for the construction and design of that kind of place, but it’s enough of a priority for us.”

At Mangia, the Italian concept at The Restaurants at Woodland, “the customizable pasta bowls are really popular,” Frank says. “We call them Pasta DiVinci, because [the guest is] creating [the dish] themselves. Another really great visual thing that we have at Mangia is a really large circular stone oven that has this really nice, red glass tile all the way around it and a window from the dining room so you can see in if you want to see your pizza being made.”

In addition to chicken sandwiches, the Stone Grill offers “better burgers, [from the] premium burger category,” Frank says. “The patties are bigger—a little bit more than 1/3 of a pound. We have different toppings and fries, onions [and] fried green beans. And it’s over a gas grill, so there’s a lot of nice presentation that goes on. There’s glass there and you can see flames and probably smell it from 100 feet away when you’re outside the building, so it’s kind of fun.”

A Cut Above is “kind of a chop house with a lot of grilled-to-order items, but we also have comfort food, and both of those are very popular,” Frank says. Options like meatloaf, fresh vegetables and hand-carved meats rotate every day. “We really tried to make sure that things are well prepared and fresh and staying away from those stereotypes of dorm foods,” Frank shares. “On the grilled-to-order side, it’s one of the things that we’ve gotten the most buzz about because we grill steaks and students are just ecstatic about that … but then we also have things like tilapia and salmon and stuffed portobello mushrooms. There’s a dining area that’s dedicated to A Cut Above, so [guests] sit there with their number and we’ll bring it to them, it’s a bit of table service.”

“Each of the concepts has their own sort of kitchen,” Frank explains. “But there’s also a back-of-house kitchen. About four of the concepts are physically separate [and] all of the food is made there, or the vast majority of it, and the rest would be made back of house. There are a few concepts that are more dependent on the back-of-house kitchen … but everything is cooked and prepared right there in front of the customer.”