Like many universities, Northeastern offers retail dining on campus; the university leases out storefronts below White Hall and the Marino Center to restaurant chains and runs franchises in International Village and the Curry Student Center.
This month, one of these venues, Mondo Subs, closed – the Ryder Hall staple is being renovated and transformed into a Subway, scheduled to reopen in time for the 2011-12 academic year. Similarly, the Cyber Cafe in Snell Library has closed for the summer to be remodeled into an Argo Tea.
These are good steps; Northeastern should continue to improve the quality and quantity of its dining options and facilities. But when one compares Northeastern’s offerings to those of other universities in Boston, it becomes clear that the university has room to catch up.
At Massachusetts Institute for Technology, students can dine at Anna’s Taqueria, whose burritos have won awards from the Boston Phoenix and Boston Magazine. Boston University has a pub dedicated to students and faculty featuring dozens of craft beers and drafts. At Northeastern, we have two burrito restaurants across the street from one another, four different brands of coffee and tea (with a fifth on the way), and four different locations offering sandwiches. The most popular offerings in the Curry Student Center are wildly unhealthy: Wendy’s, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.
We applaud Northeastern’s efforts to improve the dining options for students, both in the dining halls and in the retail locations on campus, especially when they are unique; the upcoming Snell location will be Argo Tea’s first foray into Boston, and the only other Taco Bell and Pizza Hut in Boston are in the distant West Roxbury and Hyde Park, respectively. Still, we urge the university to consider diversifying its options.
Boston University, which according to the Princeton Review has an undergraduate population only 5 percent larger than Northeastern, has a wide variety of options available to its students. Union Court, a retail food complex in the George Sherman Union, features a dozen different restaurants and styles of food and drink, including homestyle rotisserie, burritos, fresh baked bread, sushi, Chinese, pizza and a wide variety of salads. This is all on top of five dining halls and a program that allows students to have any meal at any dining hall bagged and ready for them to take away.
In comparison, Northeastern seems woefully inadequate. Outside of fast food, burritos and sandwiches, students lack healthy and unique options. The problem is exacerbated in the summer, when the only dining hall open is International Village. While more retail outlets remain open in the summer than this time last year, the choices are still substandard.
Northeastern needs to change its palate. Adding more variety to the decidedly monochromatic landscape will go a long way toward improving students’ health and happiness.
