Smells of fried chicken, miso soup and cooked beef fill Sloane Bistro, the alternative on-campus dining hall at St. Michael’s College. Quintessential Asian decorations are displayed in random clusters: dragon-red paper lanterns and oversized gold paper fans. Incongruent with the cool green and blue tones on the walls, it's how you would picture an Asian Bistro in a drafty Vermont building. Then a cheerful voice says, "Welcome to Sloane."
Ch-Ch-Changes
Long-time customers of Sloane might have noticed a few changes this year. The head chefs and waitresses are new and take-out is no longer available.
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Ann Gould swipes hungry students' KnightCards as they enter Sloane Bistro. |
Take-out at Sloane is a standard request made popular by hungry athletes. Students were more than annoyed to see the end of Sloane take-out. The reason, according to the new retail manager, Jim Careau, is safety and liability. The fear is someone will get sick, and the chefs are liable after that food leaves Sloane.
“We don’t want to kill people,” Careau says. “We are here to serve hot delicious meals.”
Brian Madden a sophomore North Campus resident says the food isn’t better or worse than last year, just “different.”
However, some Sloane customers disagree.
“The sweet and sour chicken is always bad this year,” says Thomas Wright, another North Campus resident. “It’s low budget—a rusty production.”
North Campus President Meredith Astles says she wants more American meals and less Chinese.
“Sometimes people forget we are a campus and we have to travel to get food,” Astles says. “So having more than Chinese would be really healthy and helpful.”
Careau realizes that he can’t please everyone, and with the debate of Sloane, it seems it’s impossible to please everyone.
“Unlike restaurants who serve different people everyday,” Careau says. “We have to please the same people everyday—they don’t always like us.”
New marketing ideas
“I rebuilt our whole dining Web site,” Careau says. “I’m pretty proud of it.”
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Students dining at Sloane Bistro. |
The dining Web site used to be only one page; Careau has expanded it to more than a dozen web pages, with links to every recipe served in Alliot, a body mass index checker, and weekly menus for all dining venues. It took five weeks to get up and running.
Careau is hoping to change the format of the posted menus. Currently they are Portable Document Formats (PDFs), but this becomes problematic when Careau wants to make last-minute changes. With Ash Wednesday’s switch from steak to stuffed shells, his only option was to send a mass e-mail informing students about the change.
Some ideas to chew on
Careau says he has big dreams for Sloane. He would like to see it expanded to longer hours, more students and another waitress. The current hours for the Sloane Bistro are Mondays through Thursdays, 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
“I’d like to do 200 [meals] per day,” Careau says.
On Sloane’s busiest night this year, they served hot dishes to 146 students. The employees all agree, it was a long night.
Sloane gets a different number of students every night, but the staff agrees they can handle 100 per night, a number that keeps them busy but not crowded.
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Head Chef Tim Taylor |
“We did a couple nights of 140 or more,” Head Chef Tim Taylor says.
“It was a challenge; not everyone got seats.”
Careau thinks that longer hours would make 200 more feasible, because it’s just not possible in the time allotted, he says. Sloane only seats 76 people. This means that in an hour-and-a-half, Sloane staff would have to have two complete turnovers of customers.
Astles also believes it would be tremendous if Sloane would extend its hours to be open from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. and provide a wider selection of food, more like Alliot.
“Originally Sloane was an extension of Alliot—same menu and it wasn’t very successful,” Taylor explains. “Just as the kids like the chefs’ corner down on main, they like it up here too.”
Before Sloane could handle 200 students a night, the kitchen is in need of a new top stove and an oven for starters, says Mike Nichols, manager of production and purchasing.
Nichols doesn’t see an urgency to make any drastic changes to Sloane, but he’d like to see a few improvements.
“Murphy’s Law: 'if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,'” he says.