After over two years without hot food options on campus, Cosumnes River College opened the Hawkeye Grill at the start of the spring semester, overcoming logistical hurdles during the renovation process.
Vice President of Administrative Services Theresa Tena said a new heating, ventilating and air conditioning system in addition to the updates in infrastructure, such as separate walk-in refrigerators, will allow the space to serve the campus for a long time.
“We had been talking about this for almost five years, in terms of carving out space for the food service vendor, carving out space for the instructional program, and so now, it’s all come together,” Tena said.
All of the Los Rios Community College District campuses received funding to upgrade their dining areas, Tena said.
The district’s food vendor, Pacific Dining, features over 50 hot food items on the menu.
Menu items range from breakfast and deli sandwiches to burgers and Mexican food, featuring vegetarian and vegan options.
Emma Shcherbina, a 22-year-old music major, said she had visited the cafeteria for the second time and ordered the Western Burger with french fries, which costs $10.60 as a “meal deal,” according to the menu.
“Nothing was burnt. It had a good amount of sauce on it and the fries are really good too,” Shcherbina said. “They were like the perfect amount of soft and crunch for some reason.”
Shcherbina said she has been at CRC for three years and would previously bring lunch from home or grab snacks from the bookstore before the Hawkeye Grill opened. She said she sees herself eating there a couple of times a week.
Hawk CARES Director Oscar Mendoza Plascencia said the cafeteria will be accepting EBT at the register.
Nineteen-year-old psychology major Nick Wieneke said he has high hopes for the newly-opened cafeteria and it’s worth having on campus.
“It’s a very nice variety,” Wieneke said. “There’s definitely something for everybody here.”
Tena said the money spent on infrastructure may not be aesthetically noticed in the cafeteria’s grand reopening, but the kitchen’s functionality will bring what this campus needs – food.
The cafeteria’s renovation was more nuanced than the construction of the Elk Grove Center’s newest building because the renovation’s design needed to be configured without any funding from the state, Tena said.
Entering a post-pandemic era, it was unclear to administrators and decision makers how a project such as the cafeteria, Tena said, would be funded with supply chain issues amplifying construction costs.
Associate Vice Chancellor of Facilities Management for the Los Rios Community College District, Pablo Manzo, said CRC’s culinary arts management space will have the potential to grow the program in a fashion similar to American River College’s culinary program, which features a separate bakery and student run restaurant open to the public.
Every Los Rios college will now have a full cafeteria, but only CRC and ARC have a culinary arts management program, Manzo said.
“The idea was that they still wanted to provide that restaurant experience to their students. What it’s like to really run a restaurant, to serve, to do that whole part of it,” Manzo said.
Culinary arts management professor Michael Frigm said a main aspect of the cafeteria construction was separating the space used by Pacific Dining from the instructional space.
“There’s no crossover in space now,” he said. “So, we used to share a dishroom, we used to share a prep space, I mean, we used to share a storage space and now those two areas are completely separate.”