If you’re looking for new ways to support students at the University, look no further than Bevier Hall. With friendly staff and an affordable menu, Bevier Café serves as the perfect lunch spot for students, staff and community members.
Bevier Café is a student-run dining experience with students in FSHN 340: Food Production and Service creating and serving the meals. From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., customers can visit for self-service and treat themselves to snacks or drinks. Additionally, the café has a lunch service from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day school is in session.
The menu changes weekly, with different salads, burgers, sandwiches and tacos featured each week. Part of the reason the menu rotates is so that students can test out new recipes they have created.
According to Carter Phillips, an instructional chef in the food science and human nutrition department, the students can bring in their own recipes to try in the kitchen. After standardizing the item, deciding the price and testing it out among peers, the staff can then roll out the dish.
“We run it in the café as a special for one day,” Phillips said. “Based on the customer’s feedback, who purchased that dish, we then slot that into the next semester’s menu.”
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While these new test recipes enter the menu weekly, fan favorites like chocolate chip cookies are always being served. One of the proposed dishes, the butter chicken, has even been on the menu for 15 years now because of its high sales.
The course goes beyond teaching how to curate menus, though. Students in FSHN 340 gain many skills that will help them succeed in a commercial kitchen.
According to Phillips, students work in a rotation, spending a few weeks in each position before switching to a new one. From being in the dish room to serving as student manager, students can experience all aspects of the kitchen.
“It’s kind of a lesson in working outside of your comfort zone,” Phillips said. “Throughout the course of the semester, they get to experience each of these different positions in the kitchen and see how they fit together in order to complete our mission, which is providing amazing food to amazing people.”
The café serves many people, from students to university staff and even Champaign-Urbana residents. For some students like Jillian Todd, senior in FAA, Bevier Café is their choice for lunch thanks to its proximity.
Todd only recently started getting lunch at the café. But for the past few weeks, it’s been a quiet spot for her to get work done in between classes.
“The School of Music is right on the corner of Goodwin and Nevada, so it’s really close by,” Todd said. “I saw the sign and thought, ‘That sounds nice for lunch.’”
Todd isn’t alone in utilizing the café to get work done, as many visitors sit at tables with their laptops open, typing away. Sometimes groups can even be found working together on projects while sharing a meal or snacking on a cookie and a drink.
Minsoo Kim, a graduate student studying biochemistry, spends a lot of her time in the lab working, so she likes to stop by Bevier Café to get time away from the lab. With a busy schedule, Kim sometimes struggles to find time to pack lunches, and the snowy weather makes it even harder for her to get out and grocery shop.
Thankfully, the café provides Kim with an on-campus option for lunch on the days she doesn’t get around to packing her own. The affordable prices keep her coming back to try out the different burgers.
“All the burgers are my favorite,” Kim said. “It’s hard to get a very well-cooked burger for, you know, only $12.”
Affordability is a large focus of the café, especially through the Everybody Eats program. During the coronavirus pandemic, it was brought to Phillips’ attention that some of his students were struggling with food insecurity, and he wanted to find a way to help.
“We run a teaching kitchen, we have access to food and equipment, and certainly the knowledge and skills to prepare food,” Phillips said. “So I thought, let’s put that all to good use.”
The Everybody Eats program is one of Phillips’ favorite parts of the café because of the good it creates in the community. According to Phillips, the café is on track to serve around 1,000 students using the program this year.
Much of the funding for the program comes from donor networks on campus, but customers are also asked at checkout if they would like to round up to donate. Kim has donated to the program a few times without even knowing what it was.
“I didn’t know about the program, but they do roundups whenever you purchase something, and I would do that sometimes to help out,” Kim said. “I mean, if it could help the people who could not afford it, of course, I think it’s worth it.”
At Bevier Café, customers have a few different options when paying. They can pay the menu price, pay what they can, pay a little more or pay it forward (buy someone else’s meal).
If customers can’t afford a meal at the moment, they can pick up a token when they enter and bring it to the cashier. Phillips finds that this token allows customers to avoid having awkward conversations when they don’t have the means to pay.
This program is a unique way for community members to help one another out. By simply spending a few dollars more on a meal, customers are impacting others’ lives in more ways than they know.
“I think of the butterfly effect,” Phillips said. “Donating that dollar bought the token that fed the student, that fueled them to study for the test, that got them the degree that went on to get the job that changed the world.”
Students are the biggest focus at Bevier Café in all aspects. From providing students with an affordable meal and quiet study space to teaching students how to operate a kitchen, the café team covers it all.
Bevier Café goes beyond just teaching culinary skills. The instructors also hope students pick up new lessons that benefit them well into the future, like learning how to work well in groups and building confidence working in commercial kitchens.
Overall, the instructors aim to prepare these students as well as they can for the food and hospitality world.
“Our students are uniquely positioned to step into any kitchen, I argue, across the world,” Phillips said. “They can make an immediate impact, because they can relate whatever new thing they have to learn to something they learned here.”
