This week was fairly quiet at UND. Dustin the dietitian was gone most of the week to a FoodPro Conference, and Wilkerson dining hall was closed for service Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for their annual cleaning. This gave me the opportunity to see some areas of UND this week that I hadn't gotten a chance to see much of yet.
On Monday I finished up entering the fall retail menus into FoodPro, along with the Squires dining hall soup rotation. We may have to go back next week and make a few changes, but for the most part I think the menu planning is almost done for fall!
On Tuesday morning, Mary, my internship coordinator, gave me a tour of the Squires dining facility. It is closed for the summer so I hadn't gotten to see it yet, but everyone I have talked to here and in student surveys it has gotten the highest praise of all of their dining facilities, so I wanted to see what it was all about! While I'm sure it looks much different when it is up and running, it is definitely a very nice facility. They remodeled Squires a few years ago, completely changing the layout. It went from having two smaller dining areas on either end of the building with the kitchen in the middle, to having a smaller kitchen on one end with all of the cooking and serving stations in the middle and the dining area on the north end of the building. Because of this, they have some very large windows in some odd places -- like the storage room and part of the kitchen area. They also had to work around several load-bearing pillars in the facility, because the dining hall is on the ground floor and there are dorm rooms up above, the pillars could not be moved. Mary also told me they had to plan the remodel timing-wise around when students would be out of the dorm for the summer in order to run the ducts needed during construction. Even with that, construction went past its deadlines and did not fully open until partway into the fall semester that year.
It was a little bit dark, but I took some pictures inside Squires:
This is the dining area, it had some gorgeous artwork and lighting.
A look back through the serving area. Notice all the pillars?
This middle section is their huge salad bar (soup wells are at the end). Along the back right is their homestyle cooking line (which also has a rotisserie oven), and on the back left is their pizza oven. Their burger bar & grill is off the picture to the right, and a sandwich & panini bar is off the picture to the left. (And more pillars are in the middle!)I was especially impressed by the very nice dishes Squires has (you can see some in the picture above), though they look a little heavy and difficult to work with. Mary told me they actually had such a huge problem with theft when Squires reopened after the remodel, over 600 glasses were stolen in just the first couple months! They actually bought cheaper / lesser quality glasses to replace them in order to discourage further theft. That's probably not something you would normally consider when redesigning a dining hall -- the dishes and glassware are probably nicer than what the average college student has in their dorm room!
Another impressive feature of Squires is that their hot food lines do not use wells, but instead have heated granite blocks. I can imagine that would make it much easier to clean and maintain the facility, as well as for keeping food temperatures consistent. About the only major drawback of the remodel was that the managers' office at Squires had to be put in the far back corner of the kitchen (such that you have to walk through the entire kitchen to get to it, and you can't see the serving area or dining area from the office). It was very quiet back there! I can see how there would be advantages and disadvantages to having the office secluded like that, however I am partial to the managers' office at Wilkerson which has windows that look out over the entire kitchen and you can even see some of the serving line.
All in all though, I was very impressed by the Squires facility! I can see why students seem to prefer to go there, and their staff is very proud to work there. Hopefully after the Wilkerson remodel next summer, students and staff will be able to enjoy both facilities equally.
I spent the rest of Tuesday working with the Squires kitchen manager, Molly, out at the smaller Terrace dining center. Molly had never worked out there before (since Squires is closed for the summer, she has been working at Wilkerson) and with Wilkerson closed for cleaning, a lot of the Wilkerson staff was also working at Terrace. It was very interesting to see how the staff dealt with being in an unfamiliar kitchen and getting to meet some of the Terrace staff. I got to work at the checkstand for lunch and helped swipe cards and greet diners to the facility. It is a nice little dining hall, although I am a little unsure of why they placed it in the basement of the Memorial Union building -- it seems a little difficult to find there. Another odd feature of the Terrace dining hall is that their specialty bar is enclosed in a little room that is not very noticeable. Although they have signs for it above the doors, unless someone is specifically looking for it, it is not easy to find. They were serving pizza on Tuesday and hardly anyone went in there! I think if they had it to do over, they should make a window or open up the wall to the specialty bar so that the area is more open and visible to the dining area. It is a very nice specialty bar, but if nobody knows it's there, it seems a little silly to have it!
One of the issues I also noticed with having to shift all of the diners to Terrace for those 3 days was some difficulty for students with special diet needs. Dustin being gone for the week probably didn't help matters either, but most of the students who have food allergies and specific diet needs were used to eating at Wilkerson where they have their own cooler with specific foods, and the staff there knows them and is very careful to prepare their foods separately to avoid cross-contamination. On Tuesday Molly helped all the special diet students who came in to ensure that they got a safe lunch and were properly taken care of. However, on Wednesday one of the students with very severe food allergies had a serious allergic reaction at lunchtime. While I wasn't there, Molly told us at the Wednesday staff meeting that the student went very pale and could hardly breathe, and they had to give her an epi-pen and call an ambulance. They are not sure what exactly caused her reaction, as all the food she ate that day should have been safe for her to eat. Unfortunately it sounded like there must have been some cross-contamination when her food was prepared which led to her reaction. It is not something I would have thought of being an issue when moving students from eating at one facility to another, but I think it really shows how hard the Wilkerson staff works to make special diets for students with food allergies so that they can eat safely on campus. Practicing food safety really does go beyond avoiding cross-contamination to avoid pathogens. Cross-contamination can also be immediately life-threatening when food allergies are involved.
Speaking of cross-contamination, my project that I worked on Wednesday and Thursday was to revise the UND Dining Services Sanitation & Safety Manual. Using the ServSafe textbook and the Iowa State University Extension website, I reviewed each policy from handwashing to dishroom procedures. I updated each policy and tried to do some proofreading and make it look a little more professional. I finished revising the 51 page manual by Friday morning!
Dustin came by for a little while on Friday and gave me a couple tasks to do. We will be meeting Monday morning with the Children's Center staff to go over their menu for fall (their food is served out of the Wilkerson complex). I got to go through their menu spreadsheet and put in a few changes, and then I had to run over to the Dining Services admin building to print off copies of it. Next week, Dustin also has someone from FoodPro coming to do several presentations about the program. I've really enjoyed getting to work with it and learn more about foodservice databases, especially in regards to menu planning and nutritional analysis, so it will be interesting to get to learn more!
I spent the rest of my Friday shadowing Lori, Wilkerson's evening manager. She and Molly were both working on writing up action plans for some employees who have been performing below expected standards for their job descriptions. I got to help out a little with making suggestions for actions the employees can take to improve and how to properly word the action plans. I know sometimes there are people who can be difficult to work with and there are also some issues that may be beyond what a manager can address with an employee (for example, if a doctor needs to be involved to evaluate an employee's ability to do a job). It is also difficult for me when some employees are very nice as people, to see that they are not performing all of the tasks of their job and may have to be terminated if they cannot step up. Molly had an interesting take on that, as a manager, you are not paid to be the employees' friend, but to be their boss. Sometimes that can involve making difficult decisions about people who are not performing what needs to be done.
Next week will be my last week here at UND! It will be a busy week with the FoodPro seminars and the Summer Picnic on Wednesday, which I am helping plan. I have truly enjoyed my time here, but I have to admit I am very much looking forward to getting to go home and see my daughter Audre. Only one more week!
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