Plains to Plate closes as University changes food-service providers

Plains to Plate, the only certified gluten-free restaurant on campus, saw its last day of operation on Friday as Tiger Dining will transition to a new food-service provider, Aramark, on May 7.

According to Glenn Loughridge, director of campus dining, the restaurant that takes its place in the current location will also be a gluten-free option. The change comes because the previous food service provider, Chartwells, trademarked the name.

There is currently no name set for what the new restaurant will be called.

“We’re going to continue to make it gluten-free, local, fresh – all the things it has been,” Loughridge said. “The menu should be very similar, maybe some new things. We’re not planning major changes. We should have it open this summer like normal.”

Morgan Scheu, manager of Plains to Plate, said there were lines throughout the day that stretched to the outside with people enjoying the restaurant one last time. She said the traffic was probably three times as high as it normally would have been on a Friday.

“They were taking selfies with all the signs, and some of the girls were crying,” Scheu said. “It was crazy.”

Allie Quimuyog, junior in apparel merchandise, relied on Plains to Plate because she has Celiac disease, which causes an immune reaction to eating gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. Plains to Plate was one of the few options she felt comfortable eating.

“If an employee is making cookies or something and doesn’t change their gloves before they make the allergy-friendly meals, then we’re just as likely to get sick as if we had just eaten the cookie to begin with,” Quimuyog said.

According to the Gluten Intolerance School, up to 10 percent of people suffer from some sort of gluten sensitivity.

“I feel like there needs to either be an option for people who have these dietary restrictions or give us the option to get out of the required meal plan,” Quimuyog said. “I don’t think it’s fair for us to spend $300 for food that I can’t eat.”

Quimuyog said students, regardless of dietary restrictions, genuinely liked the food at Plains to Plate. She said there was always a line to get food when she went.

Scheu said campus dining must make sure to get the new restaurant certified gluten free, not just offer gluten-free options. She said this process can potentially take years because of all the paper work.

Campus dining plans to keep the kitchen of the restaurant gluten free, and it will start the process of getting it certified over the summer.

“If they open up a gluten-free place here that’s not certified, I would be scared that a lot of kids would get sick because they think that it’s certified gluten free versus gluten-free options,” Scheu said.

She said Plains to Plate did not allow any outside food to be brought into the restaurant to ensure that there is no chance of contaminants. Not even the employees of Plains to Plate ate their lunch in the restaurant.

Certified gluten-free restaurants have to constantly go through tests of their foods to check for gluten.

“You have a lot of different spectrums, so you can’t ever take one thing lightly,” Scheu said.

This August would have marked the restaurant’s third year of existence. It has never had gluten in its kitchen, but it didn’t become certified until after its first year because of the length of the process of getting certified.

“I know they’re trying to fix stuff, but so far, the alternatives I’ve heard, just aren’t living up to what Plains to Plate had,” Quimuyog said.

Multiple students ate solely at Plains to Plate when eating on campus because it was the only way to ensure that their gluten-free needs were met.

Scheu said all the employees of Plains to Plates were allowed to apply to the new Aramark-run restaurant and that almost all did.

In all the new dining halls, there will be stations with allergen-friendly menus to accommodate any dietary restrictions, according to Loughridge. He said eventually, there will be segregated areas to ensure that food is contaminant free.

For anyone with specific dietary restrictions, Loughridge said campus dining can introduce students to chefs to make sure every need gets met.

Campus dining is considering what the need of the restaurant will be, and a new dining hall will be established adjacent to the building in 2020. There are no plans to renovate the building at this point.

Loughridge said it may make sense to move the restaurant to a new location in the future because of how many dining options will be in that area, but plans will continue to develop as things play out.

“We’ll just see,” Loughridge said. “Sometimes there’s questions you can’t really answer until you actually have something there. We’ll also really be listening to students and letting them guide us as to what options they're looking for.”

Loughridge said the contract with Aramark has specific details to make sure students’ opinions get incorporated into the direction of campus dining. Things like mandatory scorecards for student feedback were not there with Chartwells.

“We’ve learned a lot in this last 10 years as to how we want to guide the contractor to go in the direction we want them to go, to utilize feedback to give us direction,” Loughridge said. “It’s not that we were bad before or anything like that. I think it’s just anytime you have a chance to do a new contract, you take things that you learned from the previous one, and you tighten things.”