A Colorful Next Step for Cal Dining

Mike Buzalka

Well, maybe the fourth time's also the charm. As it reinvents the campus dining environment at the University of California at Berkeley, Cal Dining Services keeps upping the ante. Having already performed three major renovations—each with a distinctive touch that skirted the cutting edge in college dining while also providing its own unique contribution to the campus environment—the department recently unveiled its newest effort, Cafe 3.

The dining hall, located in the campus's Unit 3 residential complex, was completely renovated on a relatively modest $5 million budget with the help of design consultant Porter Consulting Worldwide and architects Mesher Shing and Kava Massih.

The result: a complete reinvention of the eatery into an ultra-cool lounge area with four major food stations, each with its own theme and cuisine emphasis (see sidebar) and design touches like "aurora borealis" atmospheric lighting (to see how it works, go to http://caldining.berkeley.edu/dc3.html).

Cafe 3 joins two other recently renovated dining halls—Crossroads and Clark Kerr—and a new retail grocery market called the Bear Market, located nearby. The opening solves some operational problems as well as upping the ante on the quality of campus dining at Cal-Berkeley overall, says Cal Dining Director Shawn LaPean.

"We have three resident communities with about 1,100 in each location," he explains. "The problem was that everybody was eating at Crossroads, where the back-of-the-house wasn't made to serve 4,000-5,000 meals a day like we were doing. So part of the goal was to draw some traffic away from there."

The early results are encouraging. The opening dinner drew 1,216, a huge leap over the 448 who came to the venue on that day last year. The next day's brunch number jumped from 317 to 820.

Can it last?

"We hope to keep the momentum by giving students an unbelievably comfortable and very cool place to hang out," LaPean says. "We want students to linger."

The lingering is designed to take place even past foodservice hours. Cafe 3's servery is only open for 10 weekly meal periods: brunch (10:30 am - 2 pm) and dinner (5 - 9 pm) Monday through Thursday, plus brunch on Friday and dinner on Sunday night. However, the lounge areas open at 9 in the morning and stay open until 2 am.

"These are the 10 busiest meal periods we serve," LaPean explains. "We're not going to be doing our late night service here right now because we didn't want to put pressure on a new facility. Rather, we wanted to use this semester to learn with an eye towards next year. Eventually, we want to make Cafe 3 as close to a 24-hour facility as possible because it's out closest-to-campus dining hall."

When Cafe 3 is not serving, students using the lounge can still get food and drinks from the nearby Bear Market, which stays open until 2 am Sunday to Thursday and midnight on Friday and Saturday nights.

These are exciting times for the department. Cal Dining is on pace to reach a record $41 million in revenues this school year, helped considerably by unprecedentedly brisk sales of nonresidential meal plans. They were at 1,900 on the first day of the spring semester, with 2,000 is within reach.

As for the future? LaPean eventually wants to extend Cafe 3's hours, perhaps to round the clock. He is also wants to add variety to the all-you-can-eat sushi bar by working with outside chefs like Mai Pham to develop branded signature lines of products.

And he wants to complete the upgrading of Cal Dining's residential dining locations with a renovation of Foothill Dining Hall, the campus's fourth residential dining location. "We hope we get capital dollars next year," he says. "It's in a remote location and the students seem pretty happy right with it now though. But once they see Cafe 3, I'm sure the pressure will be on."