“Do you want ham, turkey or peppermint bark?”
This week’s greeting at Bon Appétit’s Fire and Spice is a little different than usual. For the rest of the semester, Bon Appétit has decided to bring some holiday cheer to the menu.
“This is really what Bon App is all about. Giving the students what they want … and what they want now is to forget about finals and focus on the upcoming break,” said Bon Appétit employee Steve Sugarplum.
Sugarplum is a regular pan-flipper at Reid’s Café 66, where the theme this week is Fire & Spice: Taste of North Pole. While Bon Appétit had some trouble with finding gluten-free gingerbread cookies, they spared no expense to bring holiday cheer to the hearts and bellies of the Whitman community.
“We’re always proud to bring the most exciting and authentic eating experiences to our customers. We even have a local, vegan latke option,” said Susie Reindeerhunter, Prentiss Dining Hall manager.
Junior Peppy Minterson, an international student from the northern region of the globe, has some issues with the menu.
“Real North Pole cooking is more than just throwing some candy in a frying pan with a side of mashed potatoes. There’s a lot more subtlety than that,” she said.
Some students have found that the current menu relies too heavily on carbohydrates, providing them with a less than balanced diet.
“All of these sugar crashes are really doing a number on my attempts to study for finals,” said first-year Franky Winterbean.
Another student voiced her concern about the menu change at the café in the library.
“I just wanted a regular coffee to keep me up for my all-nighter, five-page Encounters final, but they had to go and put eggnog in it,” said first-year Noelle Jones. “I couldn’t drink it and ended up sleeping through the paper deadline.”
For dining-hall dependent students, this cookie-based diet may prove disastrous to final-semester GPAs. However, students living off-campus are enjoying the novelty of the new Fire and Spice menu.
“This is the third time this week I’ve been here [to Fire and Spice]. A big pile of sugar and spice is exactly what I need to forget about my thesis and impending pressure to go out into the real world,” said senior Nick Knickerbockers.
Bon Appétit will continue its holiday-themed menus through final exam week, or until it runs out of eggnog.
