As Winter Storm Inga fell upon NC State early Wednesday morning, dining hall hours and locations shifted, as did campus restaurants and convenience stores. Dining services are continuing to prepare for similar changes through Thursday as Fountain and Clark Dining Halls will be opening at 9 a.m. on Thursday, two hours later than usual for weekdays.
Randy Lait, senior director of hospitality services, discussed factors that would lead to a delayed opening in the dining halls and similar changes to campus restaurants.
“We’ll probably open late so that the sun can get up and the road crews can get a chance to do what they need to do,” Lait said. “Honestly, most students tend to sleep in a little later on snow days. If we can be open by 9, I think that would be fine.”
Fountain and Clark Dining Halls closed at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, an hour earlier than usual, while Case Dining Hall was closed completely. Lait discussed why keeping central food and service locations functioning, even on delayed snow days, is important.
“Fountain, Clark and Talley are our top priority food service units to operate because that’s East Campus, center of campus, West Campus,” Lait said. “Those are convenient. When classes are canceled, we tend not to need the Atrium, and so we have those employees who want to work, if they can make it here safely, to come on in and we re-allocate them to other units. We’re pretty well-staffed today.”
The dining menus remained unchanged, however Crayton Garrell, Fountain Dining Hall’s manager, discussed how the food is usually prepared one or two days in advance, which assists with planning and execution.
“It all depends on the severity of weather and if we get the staff in,” Garrell said. “We tend to do our best to provide everything that we put on our menu. We do have a limited menu, we do post that, and we try to give enough advance notice that it doesn’t surprise anybody walking through the door. We do have some easy, convenient-type foods, but once again we try to stick to the menu.”
If employees are not able to make it, NC State Dining and University Housing work together to ensure that food is still served in the halls.
“We’ve had a few call-outs,” Garrell said. “If we are a little understaffed, the RAs [resident advisors] or RDs [residence hall directors] actually support us on that kind of operation to make sure we do feed the students. We’re in partnership with Housing quite a bit.”
According to Lait, the university uses four-wheel drive vehicles to pick employees up who are unable to make it to work on their own.
“We’re geared up more to get people home safely,” Lait said. “I’m putting some people up to the StateView hotel tonight so that they can work with us tomorrow.”
Although most of the campus cafes were open on Wednesday morning, many of them closed before 2 p.m. Only Starbucks and Port City Java remained open into the evening.
Talley Pavilions remained open throughout the day, although One Earth World Cuisine and the 1887 Bistro were closed. Bragaw Residence Hall’s C-Store and Talley Market were also available to students, however they closed early at 9 p.m.
Rayanne Many, supervisor of the Bragaw C-Store and recent graduate of NC State, came in to work with little trouble on Wednesday morning, as the snow had just started to fall.
“It’s been pretty normal, nothing surprising or different,” Many said, discussing customer frequency in the store. “I worked until 8 last night. We had a few people who seemed like they were stocking up on things. We had a couple of people like that today to get microwavable things and stuff like that. We had a lot of ice cream last night. That was the main thing we sold.”
Local stores on Hillsborough Street, including Wolf Mart and Target, remained opened for regular business hours.
