If there is one thing I can honestly say that I love about the dining experience at SMU, it’s the wonderfully helpful staff of Umphrey Lee that always brightens my day. But that’s about it.
It goes without saying that most students (not all, for those of you who plan on e-mailing me about how wrong I am) on the SMU campus are unsatisfied with their dining experiences. We reminisce back to the day when we visited as prospective students and our eyes widened at the sight of all the food.
What happened? I told my dad all summer that I couldn’t wait to get to SMU; the food they had on Mustang Days was amazing! So why is it that I now dread eating on campus?
It was the funniest thing walking into Umphrey Lee this past weekend with my friend. Our first reaction was, “What’s going on?! There’s real food, today.”
Real food. Weekends on campus are never pleasant at SMU in terms of dining. Mac’s Place closes at 2:15 p.m. on Friday afternoons and doesn’t open again until 6 p.m. Sunday evening. But that’s okay, right? After all, there’s always Umph.
Not quite. Weekends at Umph consist of terrible hours (opening at 9:30 a.m. and closing at 7 p.m.), limited food (less than half the food offered during weekdays available for limited hours during the day), and mysterious entrees.
Most of our weekends consist of grilled cheese sandwiches and whatever limited flavors of ice cream are available. More often than not, the coffee is empty and doesn’t get refilled. The dessert, the one thing that my friends and I look forward to at Umph, is barely existent on weekends.
So what was the reason for the presence of the weekday food available last weekend? A Latin Convention full of students from middle and high school: prospective students. All my mind could think was, “Don’t believe these lies!”
Okay, okay. So perhaps that’s too much, but dining is a large issue at SMU, and my thoughts are shared throughout the student body. After all, the number of students you see dining on campus during the weekends is significantly less than that on weekdays.
Whether fewer students eat on campus on the weekends because the food is limited and the hours suck or if the hours suck and the food is limited because fewer students eat on campus on the weekends is another story entirely. After all, the “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” argument is age-old.
Weekend options aren’t the only bone students have to pick with SMU dining. The weekday hours are also quite inconvenient. Many public schools such as the University of Georgia have dining halls that are open around the clock.
Against the argument that UGA is a public school and therefore caters to more students (and in turn is able to stay open for said students), many private schools, such as Emory, also have extended hours at dining centers and are open (yes, even on weekends) until 2 a.m.
Umphrey Lee is known for closing down the main meal areas far earlier than expected. If the signs say “Closing at 9 p.m.,” let’s actually stick to closing at 9 p.m., okay? Far too often, breakfast is cleared up to an hour before lunch and dinner is cleared up to an hour before closing.
I have to admit, however, that I’m a fan of RFoC’s (Real Food on Campus) themed nights on which they will often have food from a certain region of the world. But as my friends and I sat eating our well-cooked meat, our wonderful fondue desert, and refreshing smoothies with the drapes and table clothes around us on “Carnival de Brazil” night, we decided something. If the food was even half as good as it was that night on a regular basis, we would gladly do away with the themed nights.
For those who may be a part of the upper-class student body at SMU, the use (or should I say forced disuse) of flex dollars is more disconcerting. Students with meal plans mainly consisting of flex dollars are left high and dry when on-campus restaurants such as Pizza Hut, Chick-fil-A, Montague’s Deli, Java City, and Subway are closed on the weekends.
I suppose my choice next year will be to buy some Ramen Noodles from the Market (which also has limited hours on the weekends), starve, or spend one of my 200 meals/semester at Umph on food that is far from satisfying.
Of course, there are always those students that are completely content with SMU dining, which is great. All I’m saying is, with just a little more effort (and with the use of our already expensive tuition), we could have a much greater number of satisfied students in terms of dining here at SMU.
Nureen Gulamali is a freshman advertising and sociology double major. She can be reached for comment at ngulamali@smu.edu.
