John Tice

When a 26,000-student state university from the culinary byways of Southwest Virginia laps the field in the prestigious Princeton Review Best Campus Food competition, you know something is up. After all, the upper reaches of the Review's annual listing tend to be populated by small private schools with boutique foodservices, not big public institutions with “volume feeding” responsibilities.

Yet it was Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University — better known as Virginia Tech — that came out on top of the 2007 Best Campus Food list. And that's after placing second in 2006 and ninth in 2005.

Three years in the Top 10 is no flash in the pan. Virginia Tech obviously has some major food mojo going.

The architect of the school's rise to culinary pre-eminence is longtime director Richard (Rick) Johnson, who took over in 1993 when the school's campus dining was considerably more utilitarian: traditional meat-and-potatoes board dining halls complemented by a few limited-menu snack bars.

“I came here to change it,” Johnson recalls. “We had great employees and a huge customer base — 9,000 board plan students! That was something only a handful of schools in the United States had at the time. With that board plan base, plus a good employee and management base, you could do great things. So I saw the program on the verge of something great, a diamond in the rough.”

The diamond has been polished to a fine sparkle over the intervening years, thanks in no small part, Johnson emphasizes, to a highly capable management and staff, especially the senior leadership team of Robert Coffey, Ted Faulkner and Brian Grove.

Structurally, the key move was the adoption in 1996 of a universal flex meal plan. It lets students eat at any campus dining location, either the all-you-care-to-eat dining halls or a la carte outlets, including nationally branded units, but is structured to fully fund the department's broad overhead costs (see sidebar on p. 34). It is so popular that more than 8,000 off-campus students purchased meal plans last year even though they are not required to.

It was also the flex plan that made possible what has become — at least so far — Tech Dining's signature achievement: West End Market, the pioneering dining hall marketplace concept that opened to oohs and aahs and a slew of awards — including an FM Best Concept Award — in 1999.

At West End, students can choose from a range of made-to-order dining options up to and including various cuts of steak and live Maine lobster. More traditional college food choices like burgers, wraps and pizzas (from a real wood-burning — not gas fired — oven that goes through some 50 pallets of hardwood a year) are also offered from West End's seven stations.

Complementing West End's array of dining choices are…

• two all-you-care-to-eat dining halls, including the spectacular renovated D2 (which earned the school another FM Best Concept Award);

• a pair of food courts featuring both national-brand (Chick-fil-A, Cinnabon, Pizza Hut) and proprietary concepts;

• three national-brand franchise outlets: two Au Bon Pains and a Sbarros;

• a coffee shop that not only roasts its own beans, formulates its own blends and offers 36 different varieties of loose leaf tea but holds a prestigious Golden Cup certification from the Specialty Coffee Association of America;

• a grab-and-go outlet that also offers personal pan pizzas and burgers and stays open until 2 am every night.

In addition, Tech Dining operates Personal Touch Catering, which services some 1,800 events a year campus-wide, and recently renovated its primary facility, the Owens Banquet Room. Personal Touch also handles catering for the 48 suites at the school's football stadium from an onsite kitchen.

Tech Dining also manages its own central warehouse/bakery/pre-prep operation, Southgate Food Center, which delivers chopped fresh produce and freshly baked goodies across campus.