Even in dining, Whitman lives up to the hype

Whitman kids sure have it tough. Their college's quad consists of ridiculously green, lush, toe-massaging turf. The students inhabit large, never-before-lived-in rooms, so they don't need to worry about some weirdo nudist who sat on the chair naked last year. Heck, Whitmanites will even enjoy a rodent-free semester while campus mice are busy searching for the coziest holes in the foundation of the college. And the kicker is that they are eating as well as any underclassmen on campus and probably some of the upperclassmen, too.

I recently had the opportunity to eat at the Whitman College dining facilities, housed in Community Hall. The building is spacious and high-ceilinged, evoking the peculiar but cool feeling of a cafeteria housed in a Gothic cathedral. Instead of pews, there is a melange of seating options, ranging from cramped four-person square tables, to round tables that seat five, to a few booths that could seat a friendly six. The seating configuration seems to be the most heavily criticized aspect of the dining hall thus far; many students I spoke to indicated a preference for the long, rectangular tables traditionally used by the residential college dining halls. I personally agree with this assessment; during my ancient experience as a freshman and my more recent experience as an RCA, I noticed that a lot of bonding goes on when an advisee group squeezes its collective bulk into a single huge table. I worry that this trend of smaller tables might kill some of the fun of sharing a meal with a big group of friends. But the decision to make Community Hall look more like a cafe than Harry Potter's dining hall is certainly not irreversible, and I wouldn't be surprised if changes were made to accommodate larger groups.

Seating concerns aside, the remainder of my experience was above average. The servery is divided into five stations, with menus displayed on flat-panel screens throughout the room. The Mix is the standard salad station found in each dining hall. I didn't partake for fear of disrupting my patented "Xtreme Cholesterol" diet, but it looked to be identical to those of other dining halls in both selection and quality of ingredients. Lauren Nigro '09, a Whitman RCA, confirmed my assessment, observing that the salad was on par with those she had eaten in Rocky for the past two years. Because the sandwich bar, Stacks, is only open for lunch, I didn't get to try it, but I heard good things about it from nearby diners.

The grill, called Stripes, is a clear upgrade over my past dining hall experiences. Choosing from an expanded menu, which included a funky-sounding Neptune Burger special (a trout hamburger? Daring, to say the least), I decided to order an Italian sausage sandwich with grilled onions and green peppers. The vegetables were actually grilled in front of me instead of fished out of a bucket, which was a pleasant surprise. The sandwich itself was perhaps not up to the quality that you might find in a major league ballpark — it could have used spicier peppers — but it was definitely better than any such sandwich I've had at Princeton.

The pizza station, Rustica, boasts a large brick oven to make multiple pies at once. I tried a slice of tomato spinach garlic pizza, which I found flavorful and a significant improvement over past attempts at dining hall pizza. Rustica's fare still isn't up to snuff, in my opinion; it doesn't compare favorably to Frist's Villa Pizza or even to commercial stuff like Domino's or Pizza Hut. The cheese and the bread don't mesh together well; rather, the elements of the pizza feel disparate and uneven. Still, it's a step in the right direction: A few modifications to the recipe — starting with a little less crust — could result in an end product approaching restaurant quality. There's a lot of potential here, but the execution is lagging for the moment.

The Latitudes station serves food with an international twist. I tried the pork Cubano over a bed of fried plantain strips. The meat was sweet and fatty, and the greasy pork complemented the dry, flavorful chips. Anybody remember the pink Tandoori chicken from the dining halls of yore? This was not that chicken, thankfully. I'm hoping Latitudes will keep Whitman's menus from getting stale.

The nicest surprise of my meal was a chipotle barbeque beef taco with Mexican rice and black beans. The meat was sweet and spicy, with green peppers adding nice visual contrast to the filling. Whitman's juices, sodas and desserts were identical to those of the old dining halls.

I always figured that the four-year colleges were destined to fail because no one would be able to survive for four years on dining hall food. My experience at Whitman has made me reconsider: I can imagine that a student might be happy to eat here every day. On the other hand, you still won't be able to pry me away from Colonial Club — Whitman had a nice variety of offerings, but the overall quality of the food was noticeably inferior to the fare I've gotten in the clubs on the Street.

The enormous potential of Community Hall is indisputable; what remains to be seen is whether the new college will continue to distinguish its offerings with creativity and vigor.