Last week, I went to the Becker/Rose Cafe series with Chef Daniel and Paul Muscente, two of the big characters in Cornell Dining. I recall going to the same talk last year, which was just with Paul, and I remember not liking it very much. In my opinion, Paul treated the students more like “customers” last year, but this year I was pleased that he had a more personable presentation. I think Chef Daniel’s intermittent comments made the whole presentation more palatable.

Yep, there’s a pun.

What I appreciate about Cornell Dining is that they take their job to heart and make an honest effort to be a great dining program. I’ve had food at several other colleges while I was visiting friends, and I have to say that we beat them by a mile, which was unfortunate for me to recognize because it only made the meals there worse. It’s great that we can get chefs like Daniel Czebiniak who trained at the Ritz Carlton, people who actually know good food.

That being said, I’m still wondering what’s the point of limiting how much of a certain item we can take. I’m not talking about the cookies or fruits that we take out of the dining hall, I’m talking about the hot entrees that one of the dining staff has to physically put on your plate. I know they don’t want everyone to take heaping platefuls of turkey or pork loin, but honestly the serving sizes of what they give us are too small, at least in my opinion. And it should be said that I don’t eat that much usually. Still, it seems like I just end up hating the guts of the smug individual who puts a single chicken wing on my plate. I was going to ask Paul what the rationale behind this is, but I never got the chance.

Oh well, I should probably appreciate that I even can go to a dining hall in the moment before I go off into the real world and subsist off leftover pad thai four nights a week in a small apartment.