All-You-Can-Eat

Sharpe Refectory (“the Ratty”)

Delicious Bites:

Breakfast: waffle bar with mangos and chocolate chips.

Lunch: kosher wings with pickles, carrot sticks, and celery.

Dinner: steak with broccoli and mashed potatoes.

People To Watch Out For: every one of your talking stages in the span of ten minutes, the guy you’ve talked to for a total of three times in class coming to eat with you, strangers begging for your table, strangers to beg for a table, the marching band, athletes taking up too many seats, CPax.

Canon Events: waiting in line across Wriston Quad in 9 degrees Fahrenheit, tossing a fork into the compost bin, tossing a spoon into the compost bin, tossing your phone into the compost bin, musty chancellor’s room carpet.

She grows on all Brown students like a fuzzy mold—knocks your socks off occasionally, usually mid, rarely bad—but iconic to our memory of Brown. There is community found in gathering: She’s the only place open during the blizzard, the perfect place to bum around with friends when your exams are over. Something to be said about “quality over quantity,” or is it the other way around? Despite my qualms, there are few memories more pleasant than sitting around a gummy wooden table with my friends, griping and gossiping over buffet lunch.

Verney-Woolley (“V-Dub”)

Delicious Bites: 

Breakfast: omelet bar.

Lunch: mac and cheese bar with ham, broccoli, and peas.

Dinner: samosas and Indian night.

People To Watch Out For: yappers in the overflow room, athletes after morning practice, Nelson goers, neon yellow security guards.

Canon Events: eating V-Dub for 2 weeks straight during early move-in, leaky ceilings on rainy days.

She’s quaint, she’s yummy (sometimes). A North Campuser’s saving grace. Nothing is more blessed than walking downstairs for breakfast. Tough luck on weekends, though—the North Campus trudge to Ratty breakfast feels infinitely long. Everything about her vibe is a little off, from single-use plastic utensils and paper plates when the dish conveyor is broken to the overflow room being too quiet for comfort. But her menu is consistent (where else can you find bacon on a Wednesday morning?), and there’s something pleasant about sitting at the tables facing Meeting Street and basking in warm morning sunlight.

A La Carte

Andrews Commons (“Andrews”)

Delicious Bites: 

Lunch: dry noodles.

Dinner: miso salmon, pho.

People To Watch Out For: hungry upperclassmen looking for a swipe, people cutting the line, people to cut the line with.

Canon Events: food poisoning (was it the raw pho beef or the poke bowl tuna?), the yogurt bowl’s laxative effect, slow water dispensers.

The best thing you’ll taste during your first week at Brown. You change outfits like Andrews rotates its bowls—your MWF friends won’t know if you rotate your TTh outfits. No other dining hall on campus does white rice like Andrews. The noise encourages you to eat fast—noisy gossipers in the upstairs lounge and the bass-boosted LED speaker behind the utensil station— and conversation clamors for your attention and falls away like bubbles down a waterfall. But Andrews is good, it’s really, really good.

Ivy Room

Delicious Bites: 

Lunch: smoothie bar and sushi.

Dinner: more sushi.

People To Watch Out For: 12 p.m. lunch rush, protein fiends, line cutters in cramped quarters.

Canon Events: uncuttable smoothie line, showing up after your 1 p.m. TTh lecture without realizing Ivy Room closes at 2 p.m., kettle-fried chips, stale sandwich station bread.

If you enjoy getting kidney stones, you can get four Fairlifes for a swipe. Those before the grand Ivy Room rehaul miss the avocado toast and big crunch chicken sandwich. You can’t believe they replaced the Ivy Room’s grand diversity with a slop bowl. One sushi is not worth a swipe, but swipes aren’t real anyway. You can eat salmon here until you’re sick of it. Salmon, salmon every day.

Josiah’s (“Jo’s”)

Delicious Bites: quesadilla, panini, fruit bowl.

People To Watch Out For: panini line cutters, drunk college students, high college students, college students under all sorts of influence.

Canon Events: giving up on the Melt bar and settling for the Grill, using your leftover swipes on a Saturday evening, unsavory late-night encounters.

Greasy fast food after a long day. Adult McDonald’s—tacky interior design and fried food particles lingering in the air. Progressively funkier smells throughout the night. All that’s missing is a plastic playground that smells like feet. Your grief is the loudest at Jo’s, surrounded by throngs of rambunctious, inebriated people, but loneliness skitters across the checkerboard tiles to bite you in your own mind. Don’t listen to it and have a fry.

Cafes

Blue Room Cafe

Delicious Bites: sandwich with fig jam and goat cheese (thank me later), chocolate muffins.

People To Watch Out For: 12 p.m. lunch rush, lineless mobs of people.

Canon Events: sometimes your pastry will be warm, sometimes your pastry will be cold, Sue!

You were sold the promise of the Blue Room on your campus tour before you committed to Brown. Delicious muffins and coffee every day. You burn through flex points like an open flame to sodium chloride in your chem lab. Better luck next semester. The best sandwich station on campus.

School of Engineering Cafe (“ERC”)

Delicious Bites: free Caesar wraps.

People To Watch Out For: engineers after class, professors, hangry graduate students.

Canon Events: line too long before your Barus and Holley class, matcha disappointment.

The air is rich with dread of engineers and physicists alike. You’re not here for food, you’re here for fuel. A convenient pit stop on your way to class. I’d never come here of my own volition. My free will drives me to the Blue Room for a better cafe any day. When I’m in the ERC, I’m usually wallowing under the guise of studying. It’s easy because everyone around me is wallowing too.

Honorable Mentions

Gourmet to Go

Delicious Bites: Tru Fru (raspberry, banana, and strawberry!), konjac jelly.

People To Watch Out For: caffeine addicts, hungry students off the meal plan using the microwave.

Canon Events: burning through leftover flex points at the end of the semester.

Your friendly campus convenience store. Highly underrated, highly overpriced. Great for an after-class pick-me-up. The silent soldier of the campus center, nobody talks about her enough.

Faculty Club

Delicious Bites: bussalicious bread pudding.

People To Watch Out For: professors and faculty.

Canon Events: okay networking event, okay speaker panel, okay business casual.

The Faculty Club carpet is stained with the essence of preprofessionalism. It's supposed to be a classy establishment, but the chandeliers are gaudy, and the wallpaper print is out of date. 

for further reading: avocado toast panini, secret menu.