Creating menus with international appeal

After a long day of classes, international students at Purdue University can stop by one of the campus’ global food concepts and pick up anything from a bowl of Pho Bo soup to Thai red curry chicken for a comforting reminder of home. This is one of the ways Greg Minner, director of dining services at the West Lafayette, Ind., campus, has been accommodating the tastes of the campus’ growing population of young people from abroad, who now constitute 23.5 percent of the student body. Five years ago, they represented only 17 percent.

The number of international students studying at U.S. universities grew to an all-time high of 886,052 students in the 2013-14 school year (the most recent data collected), according to the non-profit Institute of International Education. The influx is touching smaller campuses as well as the big schools, prompting FSDs to look for selections they may never have considered a few years ago.

“Murray is a pretty small town,” says Paula Amols, director of dining services at Murray State University in Kentucky. “So for these students and their families, this is probably the only real opportunity to get some authentic food from home.”

Here are some of the ways Minner and Amols try to broaden their operations’ culinary scope.

Leverage students’ knowledge of authentic fare

At Murray State, dining services turns over a cooking station to a handful of international students on a rotating basis to prepare meals from their respective homelands. Students team up with kitchen staff to scale up family recipes and learn proper cooking techniques. “The idea is that they take mom or dad’s recipe from home and turn it into a batch recipe for 250 or more,” says Department Chef Tim Bruce.

Sourcing ingredients can pose a challenge, as Murray State isn’t in close proximity to international markets. Bruce will have students submit recipes one month in advance of their menu rotation to provide time to order items from Amazon or to plan a trip to Nashville, Tenn., where the to rarer ingredients are likely to be found.

Another hurdle in scaling family recipes can be developing the correct spice combinations, as “you can not take a teaspoon of garlic and multiply it by 500,” Bruce says. His staff will instruct students to add spices—especially chilies—gradually to taste.

Take an international food tour

To familiarize staff with Asian cuisines, Minner has taken his team on food tours in Chicago’s Chinatown community. Such outings provide an opportunity to try authentic versions of dishes and better understand how to replicate them—especially the ones that students felt weren’t spicy enough. “That was amazing for me, to see the intense heat that they are really looking for,” says Kari Glebe, director of residential dining. Minner also brought staff members that are familiar with Asian cuisine and culture on the tour to help explain each dish and its significance.

Boost interest by word of mouth   

Murray State’s student-driven recipes also have resonated off campus, particularly with the Muslim community, which has few local options for halal dishes. The school’s dining services has offered halal options previously, but interest was lacking. Amols believes that allowing students to prepare halal meals lent the credibility—coupled with word of mouth promotion from Muslim student associations—that boosted participation. “There was a certain trust factor that wasn’t there until the Muslim students got involved in the preparation,” Amols says. “Suddenly 200 people were showing up for the meal.”