It’s not difficult to tell that the Orleans Room has been packed with a sea of green shirts from across Freret Street lately.

Since Tulane and Loyola began accepting each others’ meal plans, Green Wave students have been making the short trek from their campus for what many of them say is better food than at their own dining hall, Bruff Commons Dining Room.

Meanwhile, most Loyola students with meal plans hardly ever bother trying what Tulane knows affectionately as Bruff. Given that Sodexo Dining Services operates both dining halls, the different couldn’t possibly be that vast.

The Maroon wanted to see what all the fuss is about in the Orleans Room, and if there really was no comparison between the two.

On an unannounced Tuesday evening, three reporters visited both cafeterias and documented the selection of food and sampled each dining room’s similar fares.
The list of criteria to judge was extensive — among them were regular hot plates, desserts, vegan and vegetarian options, seating, food quality, cleanliness and many more.

So who came out on top? It wasn’t as easy to decide as we first thought.

Orleans Room

As usual, seating in the Orleans Room was harder to find than a contact lens in a swimming pool. After 15 minutes we swooped in as one student left his table — trash and all — before someone else could scope it out.

The choices for dinner were pretty extensive. The main hot plate comprised Southwestern roasted chicken, parsley red potatoes and green beans. The grill served up cheese quesadillas and tortilla chips with salsa, and the chef at the Verde vegan station was cooking a vegan stir-fry with rice and mixed vegetables in a spicy sauce. Then there were the standard pizza, deli, salad and fruit options.

However, a Tulane student commented that she liked the Orleans Room salad bars’ selection more than her own.

“A lot of people (at Tulane) really like the hummus at Loyola,” she said during our later visit to Bruff Commons.

Indeed, there were two varieties of hummus in the Orleans Room salad bar. However, one reporter lamented the lack of fresh spinach for salad.

After another long search for utensils and picking out multiple dirty dishes before finding a clean one, the taste test began.

The salad was standard lettuce, but there were plenty of options to dress it up. The selection of salad dressing was also striking. Everything was fresh and crisp, not wilted.

For the main hot dish, the consensus was not as positive. The roasted chicken was not as greasy as fried chicken, but was still oily and didn’t have much “Southwestern” flavor.

“Whatever it is, it’s a step up from when I was a freshman,” one reporter said.

The roasted red potatoes were adequate, though not seasoned extensively. And the green beans, though never soggy, were always a little too crunchy to the point that they seemed undercooked.

When trying the vegan stir-fry, it was obvious that there’s a reason even some vegetarians opt for the Verde station. Three meat eaters agreed that it tasted better than the main hot plate. The tangy sauce provided lots of flavor with the squash, zucchini, bell peppers and mushrooms, and the rice was cooked so that it was neither soggy nor crunchy.

Pizza is always a safe bet in the Orleans Room. Aside from the rather gritty corn meal on the bottom of the crust, it was spongy and crispy as the same time. Surprisingly, the cheese pizza was not oily and there was a clear mixture of cheeses that gave a good flavor.

Dessert, however, was definitely the winner of the night. Given a wide variety of choices, all the offerings were tasty. It seemed like it would be hard for them to go wrong with the Boston cream pie, oatmeal raisin and almond cookies and strawberry shortcake. The shortcake was a little on the dry side, but not enough to stop from eating it all.

-Kevin Zansler can be reached at [email protected].

Bruff Commons

When people talk about how bad Bruff Commons is, one begins to wonder exactly what is going on over there. Are you picturing tumbleweeds rolling across an empty cafeteria while the lunch lady serves up purée of mystery meat? Well, guess again!

The Tulane dining room was nearly full, and the hot meal section, the vegetarian/vegan section, sandwiches, fruit, drinks and desserts are all in evidence. The main dish of the evening, Salsa Fresca chicken flatbread, was really good; the salsa was especially delicious.

The vegetarian option was linguini with cheese (optional), basil, tomato, onions, and artichokes. The pasta was a bit limp and overcooked. The cheese was the most flavorful part, but that makes the dish vegetarian only, not vegan.

There is a unique make-your-own-panini area. A good amount of fruit was available at the fruit bar — which is separate from the salad bar at Bruff — but the variety was not so great. One Tulane student even specifically said, “The fruit at Tulane is bad.”

The beverage section is another story. There are plenty of soft drinks, tea, milk, a custom coffee machine, a Crystal Light machine, and two ICEE machines in the dining room.

Unfortunately, the desserts are not so plentiful. There were lots of cookies, very gummy lemon squares, a mysterious type of carrot cake and fruit cereal marshmallow bars. There was a soft-serve ice cream machine as well, but it was almost more like frozen yogurt than ice cream. Another diner from Tulane said that she liked the ice cream in the Orleans Room much more than Bruff.

Bruff seems to have slightly more seating available than the Orleans Room, which might be because everyone is at Loyola. The long bar with tall chairs wrapping around the room is a good use of space, but the way the room is set up makes it difficult to navigate. To get to the deli area, one must either walk around the front of the room or weave through tables of people trying to eat.

The doorways by the drinks do not lead to the kitchens, but rather to smaller bars for a grill section and a pizza area. These spots are not immediately obvious and might get skipped over. However, better signs could solve that problem quickly.

A more unpleasant issue are the numerous flies that dive-bomb your dinner all through the meal. Maybe they’re just trying to land on the very dirty tables. One student remarked that she found Loyola’s dining room to be “cleaner, with better seating.”

And there is no question of who has a better dining ambiance. The décor in Bruff Commons leaves much to be desired; given the choice, most people would probably opt to eat at Loyola or in the food court of the Lavin-Bernick Center for Student Life. It is clean, fly-free, and more aesthetically pleasant than the cafeteria. Bruff Commons needs to step it up!

-Lora Ghawaly can be reached at [email protected].
Cyrille Brathwaite contributed to this report. She can be reached at [email protected].