In response to the letter
“Orleans Room conditions continue to be subpar”
Dining Services strives to provide nutritious, exciting and delicious food to the students, faculty and staff of Loyola University every day. We also strive to provide that food in a clean, sanitary and welcoming environment.
We realize that the Orleans Room was not in that condition a few weeks ago. What we failed to realize, however, was that we did not explain to our customers what was happening and why. Today, we hope to correct that mistake.
We want to assure the Loyola community that we take pride in our restaurants. When something is wrong in one of our operations, we do whatever is necessary to correct that problem.
As for the condition of the Orleans Room, we were aware of the smell and we had several contractors come out to help us identify where it was coming from. Every day we took the dish return apart and scrubbed the inside with sanitizer and pressure washed the outside. We also had one of our staff members stand at the dish return so we could prevent food and drinks from being poured in the hole of the dish return.
We also had our carpets cleaned every day to remove the food and drink that spilled on the floor in that area. Still, the smell continued and we could not figure out where it was coming from.
Finally, after two and a half weeks, the motor for the dish return was fixed. We re-installed the motor and the natural sanitation process that takes place when the motor is running helped to alleviate the smell. We have continued to pull the dish return out every other day to make sure it is clean and well sanitized.
We will continue to have the carpets cleaned in that area every other night as well. Over the summer, we plan to remove all of the carpet from that area and replace it with tile and possibly upgrade to a new dish return system.
What happened to the Orleans Room during that downtime was not acceptable to us or to you, our customers. We will strive to make sure the problem does not happen again, but if something does break, we will notify our customers immediately.
Heather Bacque
Sodexo General Manager
