ResCo Dining Hall no longer open for dinner

Photo courtesy of Butler Residence Life.

BLAKELY HEATON & MARISA MILLER | CO-NEWS EDITORS | bnheaton@butler.edu & mnmille1@butler.edu

This semester, ResCo Dining Hall will only serve lunch, instead of both lunch and dinner, as it did last semester.

The Marketplace Dining Hall at Atherton Union will now become the only on-campus dining hall to serve both breakfast and dinner.

Last semester’s lunch and dinner options were a change from its usual breakfast and lunch options. However, this semester, ResCo is closed for both breakfast and dinner.

“In review of our data: low attendance in the dinner meal period, food waste, energy and staffing inefficiencies, we were led to the decision that closing ResCo for dinner will make meal service more effective and increase overall quality,” Butler University Student Affairs said in an e-mail.

According to the same email, light breakfast has now been added to Atherton’s weekend hours in response to student feedback. Light breakfast includes cereals, bagels and toast along with yogurt and fruit.

Light breakfast will be offered from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Furthermore, the 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekend brunch hours will remain the same.

One of the repercussions of this decision is a large amount of students in Atherton for breakfast and dinner.

“The RAs can’t all sit together now,” Lily Pickett, a resident assistant at ResCo, said. “Sometimes there’s also nothing good to eat at Atherton, or we all already had it for lunch. We are being forced to eat the same things again and have limited other options.”

ResCo, being a dormitory and dining hall, can be quite convenient for people living in it; some are unhappy about this change.

“It’s just an inconvenience,” Pickett said. “[All the RAs] already lived there, but now we have to get up and go to Atherton. We always went to ResCo for dinner because we knew no one would be there, and we could get a table which I guess ended up being the problem.”

Last semester, Dining Services asked ResCo RAs to provide feedback about the possibility of the building’s dining hall being closed for lunch this semester. The results of the feedback were made known to the RAs until the Dining Services e-mail was sent out to all students.

“We all really wanted breakfast to come back to ResCo,” Pickett said. “But when [Dining Services] asked for feedback, we never really think that was an option.”

Aaron Brown, a senior pharmacy major, was a ResCo regular up until the most recent schedule changes.

“ResCo only being open for lunch has made it crazy in there at lunch time because people feel that that is there only chance to go, which in turn makes it busy in Atherton [for dinner] as well,” Brown said.

Brown said he plans for extra time if he wants to eat at ResCo for lunch in order to compensate for longer lines. The same goes for Atherton at dinner time, the only dining hall open for dinner on campus.

“Bruce [a Dining Services staff member at ResCo dining hall] had trouble scanning everyone’s ID’s one day because the line to get in was wrapped around the dining area,” Brown said.

While the eating time gets cut short, Brown said the quality of food from ResCo is still satisfactory.

Butler Dining Services did not respond to the Collegian’s request for comment.

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