UW doesn’t have enough dining options for the students on campus and could bring a better experience for everyone overall with some variety.
Many students and faculty members are too busy to travel back home for lunch and dinner, which requires those (myself included) that find it impossible to skip a meal to eat on campus anywhere from once or twice a week. What starts to happen is the options all become repetitive and I find myself dreading having to eat on campus.
Being a small-town boy living in a lonely state, I was fairly impressed with the selection of restaurants in the Union when I first came to the University of Wyoming. Panda Express, Pita Pit and S’Pokes were all really good and felt like a treat for the first couple of semesters, but really got tiring as the semesters went on. The Union also offers (in my opinion not the best) Mexican food at Los Vaqueros, good craft beers and appetizers at the Gardens, and a variety of snacks and drinks at CJ’s. The Rolling Mill Café also serves coffee, breakfast sandwiches, bagels and paninis.
After wandering out of the union, there are a few other options in the Rendevouz Café, Elements and Washakie Dining center, although these tend to be a little more expensive. It almost sounds like UW has a lot of options, but when you compare it to nearby (albeit larger) colleges, it’s really not that much variety.
The nearby CSU in Fort Collins has 15 restaurants in the Lory Student Center (which is their version of the Union), and includes a Subway, a Taco Bell, Panda Express, Carl’s Jr. just to name a few. These students get the best of some of the larger chains and more local-based restaurants as well.
UW really needs to try and bring in more eating options to campus, although there could be a couple potential problems with doing that. Firstly, the Union is already dealing with space allocation problems, so adding more restaurants to the Union as it stands now would probably be difficult. What could be done in this case is to add an addition to the union or build an entire standalone food court where more restaurants could move in and provide their services to students. This brings in the next problem that has been talked about all year; the campus is currently undergoing budget and program cuts.
The university could probably bring in these franchises, but starting a franchise can prove expensive and might be difficult for the college to fund with the current state of the Wyoming economy. Hopefully the state will see some better times in the near future and can continue improving the campus, hopefully (for future students) with more dining options.
Whether they’re amateur foodies, students or staff–everyone needs to eat, and people attending campus could benefit from a larger food court and more dining options. It’s not too much of a stretch for UW to bring in more variety to benefit everyone on campus.
