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UCLA's hegemony on food service retains the coveted "Best Campus Food" prize by Niche.com
Offerings at Plateia, one of the few places open to the public.
Yum! Plateia is a five star restaurant.
By Karine Keyser —
UCLA’s dorm cafeteria used to serve vegetarian lasagna with broccoli. The cook was a militant vegetarian who wanted to make everybody see the light of the morality of not eating meat. The attitude for dorm food was: take it or leave it.
Food for students at the Westwood campus has come a long way since 1985-’87. For seven years in a row now, UCLA has been rated “Best Campus Food” by Niche.com.
“I think it’s the genuine care and comfort we give our students that makes us different from other schools,” said Joey Martin, UCLA’s executive chef.
The Westwood UCLA food program serves anything from sushi to stonefire pizza. It has a variety of restaurants serving food from around the world. Everything it serves is either made in-house or grown in the UCLA community gardens.
Plateia (“town square” in Greek), one of the multiple Mediterranean restaurants, grows its own vegetables, which they use for the salads they serve. They’re open to the public and to students, but it’s recommended to make a reservation for the best likelihood of getting a table.
Some of their most popular unique dishes include Greek salad, charred octopus, and lamb chops, alongside normal favorites like the burger and the avocado chicken sandwich.
Specialty restaurant Bruin Plate in the Carnesale Commons building is another of the many top-quality places to eat at the Westwood campus. It serves a healthy variety of foods, including pasta, bison burgers, and unique flatbreads, and it also features an impressive salad bar for the hardworking students.
“All our baked products actually come from our bakery within The Study at Hedrick (a study and dining facility),” Executive Chef Joey Martin says. The bakers get up at 3 am every morning to bake fresh bread for 98% of the campus cafes and restaurants. “It’s almost a 24-hour service,” he says.
Pastries and bread that are baked include chocolate croissants, poppy seed rolls, olive bread, baguettes, and challah bread. People can buy these inside the study area, or they can find them around the campus at places like Plateia and all dining halls on The Hill (De Neve, Hedrick, etc.).
“Throughout the year, we hold theme dinners on special holidays and events to help out the students during midterms and finals, when it can get kind of stressful,” the food service dining hospitality manager said. “We make it lively and fun by decorating the halls, and we make specialty dishes too.”
The massive upgrade to food service started in 1997, when more students started to demand higher-quality, made-to-order options instead of the cafeteria food everyone was forced to eat.
“The delivery system that was established that year allowed for more food to be cooked to order, allowing for the customization that is so common now,” said Denise Mai, a journalist for the UCLA Daily Bruin.
Today, the UCLA dining services puts out 30,000 meals a day, not just for the students, but also for the thousands of parents and visitors who come from all over the world. Residential dining halls like Feast and Bruin Plate are mainly restricted to students with meal plans, but spots like the Bruin Cafe, Cafe 1919, The Drey, Rendezvous, Epicuria at Ackerman and chains in Ackerman/LuValle (Panda Express, Carl's Jr., etc.), plus Plateia in the Luskin Center, are generally open to the public.
Places like the Bruin Cafe have a healthier ambiance to them, similar to Epicuria at Ackerman, which has a marketplace kind of vibe. While places like Rendezvous have a more exotic cuisine and experience.
“At the Westwood location on the weekends, we average between 2,000 and 2,300, and during the week, anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000 students,” the food service dining hospitality manager said.
Subsequently, the number of meals made will increase to 47,000 for the 2028 Olympics in LA, as UCLA will house some of the athletes.
“We make it very inviting for the kids,” the hospitality manager says. “Standards are kept high, and we make everyone feel appreciated and encouraged to do a great job every day.”
About this writer: Karine Keyser is a student at the Lighthouse Christian Academyin Santa Monica and wrote this article as an assignment. A family member works in UCLA food services.
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