John Tice

Shaking Things Up

When Johnson started, the meal plan base was impressive only because it was required for thousands of resident students. But since it was restricted to the all-you-care-to-eat dining halls, buying a meal plan was something you only did if you were required to.

To change that and make meal plans attractive, Johnson knew he needed attractive food options. But attractive food options meant a la carte choices from branded — including nationally branded — retail outlets, something hard to fit into a meal plan based on all-you-care-to-eat economics.

Hence, the universal flex plan.

Johnson credits the move to the flex meal plan in 1996 as the foundation stone of the reinvention of the program. “It set the stage for everything,” he says. “It allowed us to go a la carte. Once the flex plans were in place, we had a medium to do national brands.”

The first national brands at Virginia Tech, Chick-fil-A and Pizza Hut, debuted in the Hokie Grill food court in 1997 with spectacular success. The Chick-fil-A soon became the chain's top grossing outlet in the country, and the Pizza Hut was number one nationwide among that chain's campus units.

The success of those venues proved that flex plans in a la carte environments was not only viable but desirable. It also gave Johnson credibility with the university, credibility that his next major project proposal stretched to the limit. Simply put, he proposed to close down the most popular dining hall on campus and replace it with a concept completely untried in a college environment — or almost anywhere else, for that matter.

This was the marketplace café inspired by Richard Melman's Foodlife concept. Foodlife had debuted in downtown Chicago's Water Tower Place in 1993, offering self-contained display cooking stations serving upscale, to-order dishes. Johnson had seen it when he was in Chicago for the NRA Show in 1995 and was bowled over.

“I fell in love with it,” he admits. “I thought, ‘This is the neatest cafeteria I've ever seen in my life, and there's absolutely no reason we couldn't do it on our campus.’ After we put the flex meal plan in place we had a medium. You couldn't serve lobster with an all-you-care-to-eat plan, but now we were playing in the a la carte arena, and I knew we could.”

That Johnson chose to eliminate Cochrane Dining Hall to make way for his experiment seemed gratuitously truculent, though. Why not replace a less popular venue instead? (Cochrane's popularity rested on a reputation for having the best food on campus and for its “intimate” atmosphere, which was simply a function of its being smaller than the other venues.)

But the reasoning was sound. As the smallest dining hall, Cochrane would leave a smaller void while it was closed for the several years that it would take to design and build West End Market.

West End finally opened in January 1999, three and a half years after Johnson's Chicago epiphany, but it was well worth the wait. Some 3,000 students showed up the first day and the crowds never let up.

Those crowds drove the next major project: a complete renovation of another all-you-care-to-eat venue, Dietrick Dining Hall. “We renovated Dietrick basically to take pressure off West End,” Johnson recalls, “but its opening coincided with the addition of 2,000 more off campus meal plans, so that lessened the impact.”

The reinvented Dietrick debuted in the fall of 2004 as D2. It offers an all-you-care-to-eat alternative to West End that emphasizes internationally themed food stations, most prominently a Brazilian churrascaria grill, but also vegetarian/vegan, Asian, Mexican, Italian and New York deli options capped by a European dessert spread.

West End and D2 are kind of the a la carte and all-you-care-to-eat poles of the Virginia Tech dining world. There is one other all-you-care-to-eat facility currently, though that will eventually close (see below). The rest of the dining options are various iterations of a la carte venues, giving students maximum flex in their meal plans.