A new campus café with all-day grab-and-go and fine dining-inspired options

After a pandemic delay of more than two years, Wolfgang Puck Catering opened Café Bolo on the University of Arizona campus in the nine-story Health Sciences Innovation Building, a structure completed in 2020 for science education and research. This is the group’s first venture into the Arizona market.

After a soft opening in July for year-round staff, the café had its grand opening in August, introducing students to the new café just as they landed on campus for a new academic year.

Developing a tempting grab-and-go menu was essential, says Eric Paulsen, regional chef with Wolfgang Puck Catering. Students and faculty often have little time between classes. Café staff wanted to provide options that are easy to love and easy to pick up.

They provide all-day grab-and-go offerings for both breakfast and lunch, packaged in house. Choices include a yogurt parfait with fresh fruit; chocolate chia seed pudding; overnight oats with coconut milk yogurt and almonds; a protein snack pack with a hard-boiled egg, sliced fruit, nut butters and vegetables; and house-made hummus with pita.

When they plan their menus, they start with concepts that originated at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurants and revise them for café clientele.

Grab-andgo salads and sandwiches include a chicken Caesar salad; a Greek salad spinach wrap with tomato, cucumber, olives, red onion, white bean hummus and lemon vinaigrette; a chopped Italian salad with salami, provolone, radicchio, lettuce, chickpeas, peppers and red wine vinaigrette; a turkey and pesto sandwich with fresh mozzarella, arugula and pickled red onion; and a tuna salad sandwich on wheat.

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The regular café menu has a wide array of beverages and meal options. Standout beverages for the fall and winter: Spanish latte with cinnamon-infused condensed milk, turmeric latte with ginger and local orange blossom honey and Mexican hot chocolate with cinnamon and chili. Notable meal options include a bacon breakfast burrito with charred tomato salsa, a crudo panini with prosciutto and burrata and their Bolo Burger dressed with white cheddar, remoulade and onion jam.

The café also has a pastry chef on site and rotates fresh pastries daily — every pastry with the exception of laminate is made from scratch, on site. Their pumpkin turnover this fall was a big hit.

Paulsen says they always start with concepts that originated at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurants and revise them for café clientele. “We start with his recipes…with the classics and the quality that he sets,” he explains, “and then we go from there. We let the chef and the sous chef take a hold of seasonality, work with a produce vendor…to see what we can source to the Tucson market and then they create their specials from there.”

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Students and faculty in University of Arizona’s Health Sciences Innovation Building often have little time between classes. Wolfgang Puck Catering offers grab-and-go options that are easy to love.

The café has four points of service, a panini station, a build-your-own salad bar, a griddle station and a global station. The latter features a different type of cuisine every week. During three consecutive weeks this fall they featured Swedish, Italian and Indian cuisines.

Customers can order at the counter, at a kiosk, or through a QR code that takes them to a mobile ordering platform where students can apply their university dining dollars to their remote orders.

The café is more than a place to order a meal, though. The staff produces all of their offerings in a kitchen on site, contained in the same footprint as the café. [1] Staff includes five cooks, a sous chef, an executive chef, two dishwashers, a general manager, student baristas and up to five catering staff.

In their first year, catering services will exclusively serve the building where the café is housed. They’ve offered an array of catered foods so far, from simple continental breakfasts for 20 people to seated dinners for 150 guests. The majority of their catering is for lunches, either sandwich-salad-dessert combos or full buffets.

A robust catering menu is broken out into options for breakfast, breaks, buffets and reception. The buffet section includes a conference lunch, carving board, four themed buffets, and a drop-off lunch. The reception category includes two types of reception stations, tray-passed hors d’oeuvres, dessert stations, seated meals and a beer and wine bar.

Paulsen says their menu options, whether it’s grab-and-go for a student who’s running late or a seated dinner for a crowd, is based on the needs of the community. And on the quality of the final product.

“We’re definitely, and I really mean this, offering higher-quality food and beverages in the café,” he says. “As a brand, we’ve been working on just offering an elevated experience in a fast-casual environment.”

The kitchen has a walk-in cooler, dry storage and a small reach-in freezer.