Loyola students searching for a late night snack will no longer have to walk to The Boot; they can just walk to Carrollton Hall.
Caitlin Brewster, Dining Services marketing and customer services manager, said Dining Services is using an available space in Carrollton Hall near the turnaround to offer another dining option to the Loyola community called Mellow Mushroom.
” It’s a really fun pizza place out of Georgia, actually out of Atlanta, and it’s mostly in college campuses and it’s really hip and cool. It’s a really cool place,” she said. “Loyola students will go crazy over it. It’ll be fun.”
Brewster said several food options had been considered for the next dining establishment on campus. Dining Services, however, chose a pizza parlor based on feedback from focus groups that indicated pizza as Loyola students’ top choice.
During the search for a pizza vendor, Dining Services had certain criteria each potential establishment had to meet — a parlor unique to New Orleans and one that could work with the spacing limitations of the building.
“We didn’t want Dominoes or Papa John’s or something that was sort of common. We wanted something that would be unique to New Orleans and Mellow Mushroom is a small company and fairly local in the South,” Brewster said. “We received a lot of good responses about it when we did focus groups.”
While Loyola’s campus is surrounded by numerous pizza parlors in the area such as Naked Pizza on Calhoun Street and The Dough Bowl on Broadway Street, Dining Services never viewed other pizza shops as a detriment to the success of Mellow Mushroom.
The convenience of Mellow Mushroom’s location and the use of Wolfbucks alone will appeal to students, according to Brewster.
“The students can use their Wolfbucks on campus restaurants and I think it’ll make a big difference to students if they can use Wolfbucks as opposed to if they used cash … I know The Boot is maybe five or six blocks away but this is right here on campus.
Especially for those who live on campus, they just have to go downstairs,” she said. Dining Services and the corporate office of Mellow Mushroom are scheduled to meet within the next couple of weeks to discuss the spacing limitations and receive approval to open the first franchise in New Orleans.
Mellow Mushroom is expected to be open as soon as March.
Craig Malveaux can be reached at [email protected]
