Carnegie Mellon serves as both a testing ground and longtime home for local restaurants

At Carnegie Mellon University, the foodservice team isn’t “just looking to check a box,” says Joe Beaman, director of dining services.

Instead, it seeks to put the full bench of the Pittsburgh food scene directly in students’ orbit.

Dining at Carnegie Mellon is “hugely retail,” Beaman says, with just one all-you-care-to-eat venue. All told, the program will offer 34 foodservice locations, including a grocery store, as of next year.

“So many of our students are coming from all over the world, all over the country and what dining is doing is we’re providing them a flavor of Pittsburgh ... you might not be able to get out into town that often, but we’re bringing local partners [to you],” Beaman says.

Among those partners is Taste of India, an Indian concept that came to campus in 1990 and has stayed put. Mexican spot El Gallo de Oro, deli The Exchange, and all-day breakfast and burger joint The Underground have also been at Carnegie Mellon for two decades or more.

Those with shorter tenures on campus include coffee shop La Prima, Asian spot Revolution Noodle and allergen-friendly eatery Nourish.

“All of our independent family vendors are kind of competing against each other for students’ business, right? So you have to have a better meal than everybody else if they’re gonna come utilize you,” Beaman says, noting that “our program is what we like to call uniquely independent and poly-operational.”

Chartwells also has a presence on campus, overseeing a little less than half of the dining program, with purview of catering, student orientation meals and more.

Trying new formats

Though there are several longstanding concepts at the school, that doesn’t mean things in dining are standing still.

Coming out of the pandemic, one of Carnegie Mellon's longtime coffee vendors vacated campus in short order, closing two locations.

“You can’t be upset [about it],” said Beaman of the abrupt change, nothing that the pandemic impacted “everybody’s livelihoods.”

Local ice cream shop Millie’s was looking to open in one of those spots, which had always served coffee. So, the team had a caveat, telling Millie’s, “We want your ice cream, but you have to figure out coffee,” Beaman says. The brand did, partnering with area roaster KLVN to supply its beans.

And the space been such a hit, Beaman says, that the combination store is Millie’s new model going forward.

Ice cream from Millie's Coffee and Creamery

Another brand getting its feet wet on campus is Capital Grains, a student-run bowls concept that opened at the end of February. Beaman and the Chartwells team worked with David You, Carnegie Mellon senior and the concept’s CEO, to create the brand, which churns out a variety of grain and salad bowls with housemade dressings.

You hired a c-suite of fellow students and used the Handshake app to find hourly employees—a first on campus. So many applications came in via the platform that they had to “shut it down, Beaman says.

Student Grains is open from 12-3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays in the Tepper School of Business. It saw a lot of interest right from the start, with sales more than doubling in its first three weekends, Beaman says.

Being open just six hours a week is really a “limited-time obligation” for hourly workers, he says, and is something different than what the dining team is used to. But change is part of the game at the concept, which will have a new student at the helm after You graduates.

Inviting the community in

Carnegie Mellon also recently debuted a kosher dining hall that’s home to both a meat-based cafe, Tahini, and a dairy-based concept, The Edge. The meat-focused eatery came about first, when a kosher food truck on campus serving shawarma and other Mediterranean fare moved indoors.

In an adjacent space was a stone-fired pizza oven that Chartwells had run the previous year but wasn’t as successful as hoped, Beaman says.

So, the teams made a swap—dining services took over the pizza area to open the dairy cafe, which serves New York-style pizzas, pastas and Middle Eastern pastries, while Chartwells got use of the food truck.

“There’s just a lot of wins for all of our students, not just out kosher-keeping population,” he says, adding that “we’ve seen a huge uptick in families coming and joining us in that space … Your kids can have pizza, you can go and have shawarma; everyone can sit in this community.”

All of the school’s dining venues, he says, are open to the public.

At the end of the day, his team wants to match the level of dining to the level of education and experience that Carnegie Mellon students receive, Beaman says.

“Students are staying on campus and eating here instead of leaving,” he says. “We’ve brought these great Pittsburgh restaurateurs into our world instead of sending our students out into their world.”