By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
BGSU Dining wants students to get more out of visiting the Oaks Dining Center than just nutrition.
With the dining facility due for a face lift, Chartwell’s opted to rebrand the all-you-can-eat dining as the Social House. Oaks Dining Center also includes the teaching kitchen, hydroponic garden, and Einstein Bagels.
“We had a great opportunity to really integrate a lot of the programming into the Social House … creating a space for students to interact a lot more than they would during COVID,” Jon Zachrich, the director of marketing and communications for dining services.
“One thing that we’ve seen through a lot of different research and literature is that students needed a place to reengage with each other and opportunities to do that. So, one of the ways we’re working to do that is specific programs to bring students out of their rooms and share in fellowship and really engage with each other here in Social House.”
On the second floor, lawn games, like those at breweries, are available for play. Downstairs they’ve installed five new versions of retro arcade games.
The seating has been changed, he said, “to encourage students to gather not just hang out with one or two people but have whole groups of people.”
“We’ve really pushed our culinary team to do a lot of fun things as well,” Zachrich said.
Students love to eat appetizers when they go out to restaurants, so Chartwell’s has created an appetizer station that features four different appetizers daily, two domestic and two international.
“That’s really taken off,” he said. “It challenges our team to do some fun international street food appetizers. They had a good time.”
There’s also the usual pizza, soups, pastas, and vegetarian options.
One station addresses the needs of those with food allergies. The food available there is prepared without eggs, wheat, soy, milk, gluten, shellfish, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, and sesame.
Since the changes have been made here, as well as other changes in other facilities, the number of meals served has increased 30 percent.
Social House serves 1,200-1,500 meals a day. Campus-wide, about 75,000 meals are serve a week, and when all the swipes at convenience stores and the like are counted, there are 140,000 transactions a week, Zachrich said.
“It’s great trying to bring back some of the fun we’ve had in these facilities before COVID,” he said. “It’s fun to bring students back in together.”
