Fall 2024 | Feature

Chefs to the Scholars

The women behind UNR’s campus dining.

Gone are the days of relying on vending machines and ramen for sustenance at the University of Nevada, Reno. Like the students matriculating here, campus dining has grown up in recent years to make UNR a campus not just for scholars, but for anyone seeking affordable, nutritious, from-scratch meals.

About 300 employees comprise the Nevada Dining team that feeds university students, faculty, and visitors year-round. Among them are four hardworking women who find immense joy in ensuring the foods eaten on campus enrich both bodies and minds, in earth-conscious fashion.

Feeding Frenzy
Chartwells Higher Ed, a division of Compass Group USA Inc., is the organization in charge of UNR’s campus dining program operations, as well as more than 300 other colleges and universities nationwide.

Pack Place, the dining hall known previously as Downunder Café in Argenta Hall on the UNR campus, opened in August 2022. Today, it features 13 different food stations serving about 2,500 diverse dishes daily during the academic year to the university’s nearly 22,000 students, not to mention faculty members and visitors.

In the buffet-style setting, diners find stations such as the vegan eatery Rooted; full-service salad bar Chop’d; Mongolian grill Hot Top, which also serves other international cuisines; Comfort, serving homestyle dishes; and trendy eatery Street Eats, among other options.

For anyone with food allergies, Thrive is a dining option that avoids nine major allergens in its menu items and has its own prep kitchen and serving line to avoid cross-contamination. At Nook — a popular spot offering cereals, waffles, juices, and other goods — more than 90,000 servings of ice cream have been provided since its opening in 2022.

Daily menus can be perused online or on an app, and everything dished up is made from scratch; you won’t find canned or boxed items in the Pack Place pantry.

Additionally, with the help of resident dietitian Lisa Carlson, the ingredients and nutritional content of each item are published online, so diners are aware of their calorie and macronutrient intake while navigating safely around any food sensitivities.

Here, sustainable dining practices are used, and waste is even tracked by the Nevada Dining team. Eco-friendly to-go containers are offered for transporting foods home from campus, and students are encouraged to use reusable containers for food and drinks.

Also satisfying hunger across UNR are roughly 20 retail locations, such as Habit Burger and Panera, along with several grab-and-go vending machines placed around campus and refilled daily; these serve fresh meals ranging from soups and sandwiches to Asian entrées. Feedback from students about what they’d like to eat on campus is encouraged and heeded; such feedback recently resulted in a newly opened restaurant concept called Mad Macs, offering customizable macaroni and cheese dishes.

Several meal plans are offered to students each academic year, running from fall through spring, as well as during summer sessions. Purchasing a plan brings individual meal costs to between $10 and $13.66. Once a dish is purchased, a simple swipe of the student’s WolfCard (student ID) grants them access to Pack Place’s “all-you-care-to-eat” food stations. The card also is loaded with a predetermined amount of FoodBucks that act as tax-exempt cash at other campus dining locations, and users receive 10 percent off their meals. Guest passes to Pack Place also can be loaded onto the card.

Meal plans enable students access to wide-ranging and nutritious meal options while also helping them be food secure during the semester and budget-minded to manage their plans through the year.

Your Mom Away from Home
Heading up this higher education culinary concept are four female powerhouses who keep students and staff members well fed, performing what might be thought of as the motherly duty of providing sustenance to students while away from home.

Residential sous chef Erin Stoneback begins work at 5 a.m. daily. After 30 years in the culinary world, having graduated from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts (formerly the Western Culinary Institute) in Portland, Ore., Stoneback strives to overcome the “cafeteria mindset” left over from students’ high school days, which new students joining UNR often bring to campus — the belief that Pack Place foods aren’t going to taste good. However, Nevada Dining’s talented chefs soon prove them wrong.

“I think we’ve created a really great team here,” Stoneback says. “We have to be highly organized and make sure that we’re executing all of these stations all at once, so [we need] a really coordinated team to make everything work the way it’s supposed to, that the food’s hot and tastes great … I feel like we have a really good grasp on all of that to make sure we’re executing at a high level every day.”

She also explains that the Nevada Dining crew puts on fun events and cultural celebrations throughout the year to help further shift that cafeteria-food mentality.

Wide-ranging events include teaching demonstrations that show students how to cook specific items. Each semester before finals, the crew hosts a themed late-night breakfast after hours in Pack Place; a recent fair-themed event featured carnival games and caramel-apple dipping along with the breakfast fare. Before Thanksgiving break, students are treated to Nevada Dining’s Thankful event, featuring traditional dishes and pies prepared by the team.

New students with food anxieties or sensitivities are encouraged to text the Nevada Dining team to assuage any concerns. The chefs will make dishes personally for those students to ensure they feel safe and comfortable in their first year.

“We’re here for the students,” Stoneback says. “Culturally, I think with every generation that’s graduating [and] the students coming in, there’s more of an emphasis on nutrition and what they are eating. It doesn’t mean they’re going to eat healthy all the time, but I just think that they’re driving toward getting all the info they can.”

Assistant director of residential dining Nancy Roman has been using her chef background at Nevada Dining since 2021, when the culinary crew was working in makeshift tents after an explosion rocked Argenta Hall two years prior. Now, among her numerous responsibilities, she’s in charge of inventory, Pack Place’s front of house, the back-of-house scheduling, and hiring the roughly 60 students who help make meals daily.

“We work really hard here,” Roman says. “We work together and make a good team … [W]e work for a very demanding company, and we have to execute. There can’t be a day when we come in and we’re like, ‘We’re not feeling good, we have to take the day off.’ It doesn’t work like that around here.”

Roman explains that keeping menus fresh for students is critical; her team rotates menu options every 16 weeks so diners don’t get bored. It’s an immense job. Each of the 13 stations in Pack Place can serve 10 to 20 items. The facility is massive, Roman says, to accommodate this magnitude of offerings.

Along with her boss, director of residential dining David Griffith, Roman strives to better the dining hall concepts regularly. The concept of made-to-order desserts is one new idea launching this semester, with items such as peach cobbler à la mode, bananas foster, and walking dessert tacos.

“I’m excited to see how the students react to the changes we’re going to be making for them,” Roman says.

Diverse Duties
Speaking of desserts, Nevada Dining’s resident baker Shelby Decker loves how her colleagues encourage her creativity, giving her room to experiment with students’ beloved sweet treats. Her peers rave about her dessert creations, Decker seemingly singlehandedly raising the bar for baked goods on campus.

“Desserts are the last thing students taste before they leave,” Decker says. “So if the dessert’s good, they leave with a good impression.”

Nevada Dining’s retail leader, Daniela Dupkala, is in charge of dining outside of Pack Place. As a lead cook for Mad Macs and previously a pizza place called Wild Pie, she proudly asserts how fresh the food is at UNR.

She wants to bust the student myth that campus dining is expensive. She says fast food is more expensive than most fare found on campus these days, and, for all diners, the quality of food for the price is unparalleled.

In fact, anyone can enjoy the offerings at Pack Place. It is open to the public, and the Nevada Dining team says it’s hard to beat the flavors or freshness found at Pack Place’s stations, whether you’re studying, teaching, or just on a lunch break from your off-campus employment.

Dupkala also touts the vending machines serving hot meals, which are found in several of UNR’s buildings and are relatively rare in general.

“To me, cooking is an art, and you really have to know a lot about food,” Depkala says. “I’m proud of the whole team, that we’re crafting fresh food for our students. We provide nourishing food because it’s important to them so they can focus on their studies and have the power to do it.”

Attendance or employment at UNR is not required to relish the gastronomic array available on campus. The students especially have plenty to celebrate with the Nevada Dining team, and these women at the helm, and their contributions to higher education through nourishment.