McCormic 1

Mikayla McCormicLauren BarrettEnglish 226823 September 2014Union Market Dining HallOhio States Union Market is the main hub of all the university dining halls, raking in roughly $3000 a day from hungry students looking to relieve themselves of a block or two. The Market is located in the Northeast corner of the Union, which is pretty new. When you walk in, the actual room is a giant circle, split into four walls that have different stations lining them. These splits are caused by doorways, since people may or may not want to be able to enter and exit the dining hall.The south entrance is an open hallway that directs you straight in to the Market. The west entrance is a giant open wall that connects the food to the seating, with cashiers as the tollbooths. The north split is just a small hallway that leads to the recycling room and the dock, respectively, and the east split is simply the doorway that leads back to the kitchens. The lights are warm and dim, but you can still see everything clearly. The ceiling is a weird paneling style, where there are a few tilted panels hanging down but you can see the majority of the actual ceiling. Its like the Market wanted to be modern and pretend like this wasnt a campus dining hall, but I cant say that it is convincing. Colors include deep purples, tans, blacks, oranges, and metal; this means nothing to me, but Im sure there is some sort of interior designer theory behind using these colors and how they affect people. On the south wall is Dough-hi-O, where you can enjoy freshly made panini, sandwiches, and wraps. Next to them is the sushi station, which is pretty self-explanatory: a contracted sushi company comes in a makes the sushi that we sell daily. They dont really see a lot of student traffic, since their product is mostly prepackaged and sold with the Grab n Go food. The best way to describe Dough-hi- is a student-run Subway. Recently, we added a gyro station into the mix and somehow it is doing really well. They also have a fancy new Yonana machine, which apparently makes ice cream out of nothing but frozen fruit. Its really not that popular, considering it is $5 for a small cup, but that isnt a surprising price. People will flock to this station during dinner rush, because they reason with themselves that it would still be faster than getting a burger. Dough-hi-O is also reasonably priced, even if the students dont care about what they are spending. The sandwich station is probably the harder side, considering how impatient students get with you. Usually students will rattle off their sandwich order like they are auctioning it off, and scowl if you have to ask them to repeat themselves. The workers smile because they have to as kids constantly point out that they put too much or too few of something on their precious sandwich, or that they want their sandwich to be toasted, but not too toasted. The sandwich line will usually go back as far as the center of the room, while the panini side is mostly kids clustering in the same spot as the Fired Up kids to create a giant blood clot in the flow of bodies.The east wall is dedicated to Fired Up, which is dedicated to burgers on one side and baked potatoes on the other. Fired up does offer other random food items, like a buffalo chicken quesadilla or pretzels, but the main focuses are burgers and potatoes. The burger side is a build-your-own style, but there are recommended specialty burgers that have designated toppings. Baked potatoes follow the same style, allowing you to put whatever topping you want for varying prices. This is probably the craziest station to work, because we grill the burgers, bake the potatoes, and fry the fries on site; it is rare to leave Fired Up without a burn mark on your body. This is also the station that students willingly wait 20 minutes for a burger and completely clog up the entrance because they were told it is the best station in the Union Market. As they stand there, watching the poor workers with hungry eyes, you all but have to shove them out of the way to get to the exit because no one cares about anyone else. They will also never fail to let you know how long they have been waiting for their food, even if youve explained that you needed to run to the back to get more burgers, or that the grill isnt hot enough; one of the untold perks of working at a campus dining hall is being treated like a second-class citizen by fellow students of various ages.Moving north, you have Passports. Half of this station is a sort of featured cuisine setup, where each semester is a different type of food; this semester is American BBQ, where last spring it was Vietnamese. The other half is pasta, either in a bowl or a wrap (crazy, right?) with whatever sauce you want and up to four toppings. This is our second-most popular station, since a lot of athletes need to eat enormous amounts of carbs for their workout regimens. For some reason, students cannot seem to grasp where to enter the line over here, and often converge from two sides of the rope. Usually asking who was next is the most civil way of sorting out the chaos, but students become grouchy when they are hungry and will just try to order over each other. Students also enjoy barking orders at servers, rather than asking for toppings when receiving their pasta. It seems that while looking down at the options, students forget that they are talking to real people on the other side of the glass and try to cheat the system. For the record, yes the pesto counts as a topping and not a sauce. You cannot get one extra topping.Grab n Go is technically a station that contains premade sandwiches, salads, snacks, etc. Students will just walk up and take something, but sometimes they decide to just deposit all of the food they dont want there and pretend like it never existed. I suppose that is easier than simply returning the food back to the station, or putting that banana back in its spot roughly 20 feet away. Another favorite of students would be to look at a stack of sandwiches, pull from the middle of the stack, and leave the toppled mess for someone else to clean up. Back of House is in charge of stocking/cleaning these shelves, and up until this year were also in charge of preparing the food. Somehow, the heads of the dining halls decided that it would be more cost effective if we had everything shipped in to us, so now we just fill the shelves and prep dishes for other stations like salad bar.Speaking of salad bar, in the center of all this chaos is Across the Field. This station is particularly popular amongst athletes as well, or at least people pretending like they are physically active and they are better than you for eating a salad despite using ranch dressing. While serving salad, salad bar also has a parfait side. Many people like to take the opportunity the parfait side provides to buy heaps of strawberries for some strange reason, completely choosing to ignore the fact that someone in the back has to wash and cut every single one of those strawberries. Oh, and kale salad is huge, because apparently some famous person somewhere said that kale is the ultimate health food. Well let me tell you, our kale is covered in house-made vinaigrette that is mostly canola oil and is completely NOT healthy. Even so, we sell that stuff like crazy to people who are making the choice to believe that a campus dining hall is selling something healthy. This is the station that tends to become the dirtiest, because students just grab their food with tongs and toss it everywhere, leaving lettuce and ham lying all over the counter. It is worse near the dressing, because no one was taught how to squeeze a bottle and just dump globs of dressing onto the common space. These are immediately left for the employees to clean up, because their time is evidently less important. Soup is served here, but that goes as well as one would expect during the colder months. Luckily, Across the Field has a very smooth system of movement, so students and grab their food and leave their messes with great ease and efficiency.Dinner rush is probably the most insane time for the Union Market, and also the most self-absorbed. As students travel in their giant packs and take up all of the free space, you realize that this is a very cutthroat environment. If you want to get food, you have to fight for your space and pray that the person in front of you doesnt order the most difficult dish we serve. Every single person there suddenly develops a me mentality, and the desire for immediate results/impossible standards. If you ordered a burger, you are going to wait; dont bite off the head of the employee who just wants to make some money while in school. This sort of temperament doesnt just appear in campus dining halls, either. Many students forget that the world doesnt exist to serve them; things take patience, time, and effort to achieve. There is also the lack of compassion toward employees, who are also students. It seems like there is no room for kindness in the culinary world, or even on campus.