Spartan Cafe receives updates

Southwestern Community College’s Spartan Cafe has recieved a number of updates to provide more options to students.

Spartan Cafe Manager Dan Marcus explained that a new all-you-can-eat lunch option will hopefully provide more choices and calories to hungry student athletes.

“We’ve had so many student athletes and by doing an a la carte, some of them weren’t getting enough to eat,” Marcus said. “To make it so they could get their calorie counts up and the athletes could go and perform better, and everyone nutritionally wise, they can get more for their buck, we decided to implement it.”

This lunch option is offered from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. for $12.50 a person. The buffet features a salad bar, Main Event daily special, pasta station, stir fry, sweet treat dessert and fountain drinks.

“Right now it’s on a trial basis,” Marcus said. “We hope it comes out that it’s working fantastic and we can maybe do it full time even.”

Now that this lunch option is in place, the short order option has been moved to a new window, specially built for this option.

“We used to go and put all the short order stuff on that side, but to make it easier for our staff and the students, we kind of wanted to separate the short order from the all-you-can-eat site,” Marcus said.

Marcus hopes that, along with getting student athletes extra calories, it will prompt all students to try new items.

“Some of the other students that are saying, ‘Hh well, I can get this item, this item, and this item, and it’s going to cost me the same, so I might as well go the all-you-can-eat route,’” Marcus said. “Hey, I’m able to get for one price, I can go and try different items that I wouldn’t normally try if it wasn’t all you can eat also. It opens up their palette.”

All options at the Spartan Cafe are available to community members as well as students.

“We are open fully for the community. They can use it breakfast, lunch and dinner when we have it,” Marcus said. “We’re not just for the students, we open for the public also. We take card, we take apple pay, all the platforms on that, and cash.”

So far, the new offers have been successful.

“The students like it. We do have on the short order side, I do some of the items that they liked last year for our meals that are maybe not economical for us to do on the all-you-can-eat basis, they’ll have the option that they can go and do a one time through on the short order side of it too,” Marcus said. “We’re averaging at lunchtime, on the short order side around almost 100 customers, and on the all-you-can-eat, we’re averaging around 50-60.”

Located in the main lobby area of the Student Center, the Spartan Cafe is open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Sundays.