Power Players 2017: Campus food a big draw

The food on campus is a big selling point to prospective students at Hendrix College, and little wonder. The school has earned honors from both student survey-oriented sites like niche.com and from the pros at NACUFS, which has repeatedly honored Hendrix with plaudits such as the three Gold Awards it received in the most recent Loyal Horton Awards competition.

On-campus dining is a communal affair at Hendrix, where more than a thousand of the school’s total undergraduate enrollment of around 1,300 live on campus and are on the meal plan. Campus dining traffic is also boosted by college staff and members of the surrounding community coming in for meals.

The single dining hall offers continuous service from 7 a.m. to midnight Monday through Thursday, with more limited hours on weekends. The venue features a grill, omelet bar, smoothie station, made-to-order sandwich station—an “upscale Subway,” in the words of Director of Dining Dawn Hearne—and an extensive salad bar. There’s also a homestyle line where four entrees, including two vegetarian, are served daily along with nine rotating fresh vegetable sides. The Worlds Fare station has a pizza oven and rotates through various regional and ethnic cuisines ranging from Cajun to Asian. It’s all rounded out by a very popular do-it-yourself wok station.

Introduced last year to supplement the salad bar and vegetarian offerings was a “Whole Foods-esque” plant-forward-type menu with grilled and roasted vegetables, sautéed vegetables like baby bok choi and Brussels sprouts as well as greens and grains-based salads. “It’s really shocking how popular that area was this past year,” Hearne says. “You just saw people making a beeline for it to see what we were serving that day, and we want to polish that up and expand on it a bit more this year.”

Plant-based eating is also emphasized with Meatless Monday menus that see the vegetarian selections highlighted on the entrée station and a special vegetarian pizza featured at the pizza station.

At the opposite end of the protein spectrum, housemade gourmet burgers are featured twice a week on the grill line with a variety of topping choices.

The campus retail dining outlet, the Burrow, is only open 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the week.

“We have some steady regulars down there,” Hearne offers. “Because we don’t offer carry out upstairs in the dining hall because it’s all-you-care-to-eat, people who need to take their lunches to a meeting or something use the Burrow for that.” It is also a somewhat quieter space during the busy lunch rush, a preferable place for a professor to meet with a student or colleagues to sit down together.

The Burrow menu includes grilled items like burgers and grilled cheese, cold sandwiches, pizza, smoothies, and Peet’s coffee and tea products. It also has an all-day breakfast menu including breakfast burritos and French toast.

So, how does Hearne account for those high ratings students consistently give the dining program?

“Well, we’ve always been proud of our food and we do serve higher quality food, many from scratch and many in tune with the kinds of things students are asking for,” she says. “But the one thing consistently at the top of everything we see is the relationships they have with our staff and the personal attention they get when they come in. Our servers and cashiers make an effort every year to learn all the freshmen’s names and know something about them and what they like.”

The department also keeps track of student birthdays “and if their friends are nice enough to tell us when they come in we’ll have a birthday cake and everyone on our staff will go out and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to them,” Hearne notes.

Securing locally grown produce is problematic as Hendrix isn’t in a particularly productive agricultural area, but the school does use local suppliers for some of its meat and dairy needs. “When it’s high season for produce in Arkansas we don’t have a lot of students here,” Hearne explains, “but we do those things when we can and we’re looking for ways to expand that and find places that can meet our standards and also our volume needs.”

Specials and monotony breakers like the Warrior Wagon “food truck” (actually a mobile food cart), which generally rolls out every other week, are used to bolster the menu options with dishes like Korean barbecue tacos and gyros.