Established in 1982, Fountain Dining Hall highlights the growth of NC State Dining in food quality, preparation and attention to dietary restrictions throughout the past 40 years.

Randy Lait, Senior Director of Hospitality Services, describes some of the major changes to Fountain, including forward-facing cooking stations, which were added over the summer of 2018.

“When I got here in the fall of 1978, there was not a campus dining hall,” Lait said. “The Atrium was open, but different from how it is now, and Talley had a little cafeteria line. Harris Hall was a cafeteria and it closed in 1972. There have always been restaurants on Hillsborough.”

The opening of Fountain was a big deal for campus dining, Lait said, and the impact can still be seen today.

“Fountain was opened in 1982,” Lait said. “Fountain Dining Hall is named for Alvin M. Fountain, who served as an English professor at the University for 46 years… Case was there and had a dining hall, but it was only for student-athletes. Clark Dining Hall, it used to be Student Health Services, the old infirmary, and was converted into a dining hall in 2002.”

Lisa Eberhart, Director of Nutrition and Nutritional Wellness for Campus Enterprises, said that much has changed in regards to food quality throughout her time working for NC State, and that hiring chefs has been a major factor in that change.

“I’ve been working for NC State for 20 years and 20 years ago they just had a few entrees… the food wasn’t really known for being that great,” Eberhart said. “It was a lot of packaged food. About 15 years ago, we hired our first trained chefs on campus. Then ten years ago, we turned our focus to elevating dining in general. We have grown to having over 20 trained chefs, seven executive chefs, and a research and development chef.”

Ranked as one of the nation’s healthiest campuses, NC State was also the first to successfully complete Michelle Obama’s Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) program.

“We are really glad to be one of the healthiest campuses, but also one with delicious food,” Eberhart said. “We were the first to achieve the Partnership for Healthier America goals… There were 26 criteria, about 10 were for recreation, three for transportation, and the rest for dining.”

In addition to being one of the healthiest college campuses in the nation, NC State is also one of the top 10 allergen-friendly schools in the nation.

“We mark things for the top eight allergens,” Eberhart said. “Those are things like fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, gluten, soy, dairy and eggs. The other things that we mark are vegan and vegetarian… we also let people see the full ingredient list. The other thing we just started marking here is Halal, for some of the Muslim population on campus who eat Halal.”

In addition to the freshness, healthiness and openness about ingredients, part of elevated dining experience comes from food preparation. Lait stressed the importance of seeing how food is prepared, rather than having it appear from a kitchen in the back.

“We like to do display cooking,” Lait said. “It is good if the cooks can make food facing you and you can see it made right in front of you. We have been trying to do more things like that, but Fountain was designed so it doesn’t work that way… where all the food was made in the back.”

The layout of Fountain — one kitchen, two serving areas, two dining rooms and an office area in the middle — does not make it easy to incorporate forward-facing cooking stations. While a challenge, this year Campus Dining and Hospitality Services have managed to add more stations to Fountain, according to Eberhart.

“This year, we have a lot more stations at Fountain and we plan to continue to blur the line between producing the food and asking for the food by doing a lot of cooking out front,” Eberhart said.

Although utilizing the space as best as they can for now, Lait expects the age of Fountain Dining Hall paired with quickly improving food preparation services to be a more relevant concern in the future.

“We have tried to keep Fountain fully operational all year because it is our biggest dining hall and it is where we feed orientation in the summer, so there is never really time to close Fountain to do a full renovation,” Lait said. “For a building that is 36 years old, you can tell that there is some age on the facility. One of the things that I’m interested in is, ‘Where will the next dining hall be?’”

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