Barren of Beef

Arbuckle Dining Pavilion, you know I love you.* But sometimes your menu board malapropisms slay me. Like this from last week:

BARREN OF BEEF!

* No, seriously, I love you. On the same day I took this menu board photo, I was tired and not feeling well and craving serious comfort food. And you delivered with a chicken pot pie special:

Important Bar Gelato update!

The Arbuckle Dining Pavilion at the Graduate School of Business is selling Bar Gelato for $.50 less than the Coupa price!

The downside: their flavor selection is not as good.

I have shot glasses bigger than this...

So there are a decent number of places to get beer and wine on campus, not that I do so on a regular basis (it's my workplace, after all). But last night I had occasion to eat dinner at the CoHo, and decided to get a glass of wine.

Their chalkboard menu no longer seems to mention wine, so I asked the cashier if they still serve it. She informed me that they had both red and white. I knew from previous CoHo experience that pressing for further details would be a waste of time, so I asked for white.

I also knew not to expect a generous pour, but was shocked to discover that they'd downsized their (plastic) cups even further since the last time I'd ordered wine.

Here is a crappy cell phone photo of my cup, along with my keys for scale. I could have downed this like a shot.

My favorite thing to eat on campus this summer

This summer has, as previously mentioned, been pretty dismal as far as on-campus food goes. But I have to give a shoutout to my absolute favorite thing to eat on campus this summer: the Naia Bar Gelato. I think these are at all the on-campus Coupa locations; look for the square coolers with the chalkboard signs.

Despite the name, the bars on offer are a mix of sorbet and gelato flavors. Now that I'm off coffee, they're the perfect thing to grab when I need an afternoon break from work. The Guittard Dark Chocolate Sorbetto more or less restored my will to live one day in June when the coffee withdrawal was at its absolute worst. Other flavors for which I can vouch: Lindcove Ranch Tangelo Sorbetto (pictured above), Twin Peaks Orchards Blood Orange Sorbetto, and Madagascar Vanilla.

Arepa

It's summer and I am stuck in a lunch rut. Arbuckle Dining at the GSB did not bring back the much-loved every-other-week build-your-own pasta station from last summer. There are fewer on-campus eateries open, and the ones that are available are usually overrun by campers and summer conference participants.

So it seemed a good time to try one of the Venezuelan specialties from Coupa's GSB location: an arepa with fresh white cheese, black beans, and nata.

This is only the second time I've ever had an arepa, which for those not in the know is a stuffed corn-based griddle cake. The first time was actually in Venezuela, on a school trip in high school. I don't remember much about it; I was a 14 year old white kid from northern New York, which is to say that I knew nothing about food.

The Coupa arepa was crispier than I expected. A visit to Wikipedia's arepa page leads me to suspect that Coupa uses the waffle iron-esque Toasty Arepa in their kitchen; mine had that same almost too perfect round shape. It was tasty; a bit bland, which was not a problem for me (am currently trying to fix a chronic heartburn problem, so bland is good) but others might prefer more flavorful filling options like sun-dried tomatoes or shredded beef stew.

The menu said that arepas take 10-15 minutes to prepare. When I ordered, I was told the wait would be 15 minutes. It took closer to 25 for my arepa to finally make an appearance. Coupa has many virtues, but it's not the place to go if you're in a hurry.

Disappointed!

So obviously I failed as a food blogger in June. Excuses:

1. Was sick with a cold for a while.
2. Then gave up coffee immediately afterwards, which sucked my will to live.
3. Was gone to San Diego for a conference for almost an entire work week.

I did make it all the way over to the Science and Engineering Quad (not one of my usual haunts) for another adventure. But first, another shameful confession: I had never been to Ike's before.

For those not in the know, Ike's (located in the Huang Engineering Center) is the Stanford outpost of a wildly popular San Francisco sandwich shop. I knew that Ike's Stanford was notorious for long lines, so I placed an order online at 10:30 or 11 for pickup at noon.

Shortly before noon I trekked across the main quad and over to Huang. There was a huge line of people waiting to order, despite it being late in finals week -- a time when many students had already left for the summer. And there was no obvious place to pick up online orders. A woman kept coming out from the kitchen with sandwiches and yelling names, so I assumed she'd do the same with mine. A few minutes of awkward standing around later and the man at the cash register asked if I was picking up an online order. I gave him my name; he went to the back and retrieved my presumably-once-warm sandwich, which had been sitting back there for who knows how long.

This is a sandwich whose clever name I forget, but which included bacon, lettuce, tomato, melted Swiss cheese, avocado, and of course Ike's "dirty sauce" (reportedly a garlic aioli) on French bread. As I unwrapped it for a photo, it became obvious that there was no way to make it look good for the camera.

And this was possibly the most disappointing sandwich I've ever had. The melted Swiss had congealed. The lettuce was in the form of tasteless shreds. It was gloppy, messy to eat, just... not good. I think I put off writing this post because I feel sad every time I remember this sandwich. How could anything with bacon, avocado, and Swiss be so aggressively not good?

I guess there are some things you can only learn the hard way. Last month I learned that not only will I never again go out of my way to eat at Ike's, I will probably go considerably out of my way to avoid eating there.

Olives at Building 160

First off: the Stanford Hospitalities and Auxiliaries page for this eatery lists its name as "Olives@Bldg160," but I refuse to use that in a post title.

I always think of Olives as "that vaguely Mediterranean-ish place over by History Corner." Its website, however, tells me that its food is "inspired by Greek, Thai, Indian, and California cuisines." That's... quite a combination.

Anyway, I've been to Olives before, but don't remember ever getting anything other than lasagna or pasta Alfredo. So, I went back last week (breaking free of the hold that the GSB French dip had on me) and tried the vaguely-Mediterranean chicken skewers with couscous.

The chicken and couscous were perfectly fine, but the happy surprise of this meal was the side of what tasted like freshly-made hummus with pita. If they sold the hummus and pita a la carte, I'd eat here constantly.

This week's obsession

French dip with rosemary au jus on an onion roll (GSB cafe weekly grill special):

I've had it for lunch every day this week and I can't explain the obsession. I've never been a particular fan of French dip sandwiches, nor of consuming large quantities of red meat in the middle of the day.

Really wish they'd offer a half-sandwich option though. This is WAY more food than I need.

First Visit to the Thai Cafe

After deciding to start this blog, but before I got around to writing an intro post, I made my first visit to the venerable Thai Cafe. The Thai Cafe is known for selling $6 entrees (cash only!) out of a window overlooking a courtyard in the Main Quad, over by Jordan Hall and the math/computer science library.

I'd heard that the lines here tend to be long, but there was no wait when I showed up just before 11:30 on a Thursday afternoon. I got a very good vegetarian curry with potatoes, butternut squash, and carrots:

With the rice, it was a ton of food, far more than I could eat, and at $6 it is easily one of the best lunch values on campus. I found the curry a little on the spicy side, but I am a notorious wuss when it comes to spice; I'm sure a normal person would consider it mild.

I'll probably add the Thai Cafe to my regular lunch rotation, at least on days when I have cash with me. Which is admittedly not all that often.

A Confession

I'm going to start this blog with a confession: despite having worked at Stanford for going on four years, and despite buying my lunch nearly every day, I rarely venture beyond my comfort zone to explore the full range of food options on campus. And by "comfort zone" I mean the Graduate School of Business Cafe, also known as the Arbuckle Dining Pavilion. As is obvious from the noon lines at the sushi station and the salad bar, this is not exactly one of the best-kept secrets of the Stanford dining landscape.

I'm hoping that writing a blog about food at Stanford will motivate me to get out and try new things. If nothing else, it will give me a place to share exciting news such as the discovery that Coupa GSB and Coupa Green Library now carry nine different flavors of gelato bars.

And also to share things like this:

The GSB cafe likes to get creative with its weekly pizza specials. Lots of fusion pizzas on offer (Mexican, Indian, etc.) But never before had I seen what confronted me on Monday at the pizza station: pizza topped with pasta and meatballs. I can't decide if this is very, very awesome or very, very wrong.