Prep School Food &: How Does the Competition’s Cuisine Compare? An Inside Look at Peer School Food
By Peter Conforti ’10
News Reporter
The average four-year student may eat in the Dining Hall 1,500 times while attending Choate. Some students are known to skip almost all meals and subsist almost entirely on food delivered by local restaurants, while other students love the dining hall menu and look forward to eating there everyday. But how does Choate’s food service compare to those at other prep schools? What about sit-down meals? How is Hill House unique?
One of the newly formed “traditions” in the Dining Hall is sit-down lunch, a concept which since its inception has been met with a tepid reception at best. But what about sit-down meal programs at other prep schools? Are they better or worse? Parker Poliakoff ’10, a new sophomore who attended the Eaglebrook School before Choate, said, “Eaglebrook was all sit-down meals, even on Saturday and Sunday—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I like to have the freedom of just being able to walk in and walk out at Choate.” Kate Goldmann ’08 attended Hotchkiss for two years before coming to Choate. “Hotchkiss did have a sit down meal program, but it did not run as smoothly as ours does. There were often painfully long lines that one had to wait through to get to the food. The food was often worse on those days, compared to here where generally the food is better on our sit down days,” she said. Of course not everything at Choate is that much better. “For some reason,” says Parker, “it wasn’t that awkward at Eaglebrook, I don’t know why. Maybe because it was an everyday thing.” Though some students may not like sit-down lunches, and others may complain about not being able to spend time in their rooms relaxing, Choate’s sit-down lunches seem to fare better than those at its peer schools.
One of the things that may be better during sit-down lunch is the food service. The quality of food service is obviously very important as students are eating in the Dining Hall daily. Some students who attended other schools prefer Choate’s cuisine to that of their previous schools. “I have found the service and the food to be better here. The service in particular helps to contribute to the amiable environment that one finds in the dining hall,” Kate said. According to Ward Ganger, Director of Dining Hall services at Exeter, Exeter has a buffet style menu, much like Choate, but also has a six-week rotating schedule of meals that changes depending on what the students did or did not like. At the end of October, Exeter will conduct a survey of all students, staff, and faculty asking what they think about the food service. After this survey Exeter will benchmark the results with those of other schools, especially four-year colleges. This comprehensive analysis, according to Exeter, will help maximize the quality of service offered there.
Students in 1968 enjoy a sit-down meal. How do these meals at Choate compare to those at other schools? PHOTO/Archives
