Bray Days: Food

Aside- I didn't have any pictures of the dining hall, but I do mention this bridge below. Maybe if I waited less than three decades to write about parts of my life I'd have better pictures.

Food had to be figured out quickly at RPI, and DAKA was there to provide. College meal options have all sorts of side possibilities now, with mixes of “meal points” and virtual cash, plus multiple commercial chains located on campus. We had DAKA, the food service that ran all of the dining halls (with their all you could eat, meal plan system) as well as the Union pizza place and cafeteria. (These were separate from the plans.)
 
Freshmen were required to start on the twenty meal per week plan. This was to prevent us from trying to save money by starving ourselves. Eventually, early in our engineering careers, many of us could have benefited with knowledge of this skill, but it was not to be. The reason the plan was not divisible by three was the dining hall provided only brunch and dinner on Sundays. Bruch quickly became a favorite of many of us. Getting there early enough to snag a newspaper before the pile ended up looking like the bottom of a birdcage became one of our life goals at the start of out higher education days. 
 
One could have breakfast while working through, and trading, newspaper sections. Homework and reading were also often done in this atmosphere. By prolonging the stay, the more “unch” side of the brunch items, such as selections off the grill, became more appetizing and a second meal could be grabbed before we went off to Sunday’s Juggling Club meetings.
 
That offering was only in the Commons, the largest dining hall. It was situated in the center of freshman hill, which was across the bridge from the rest of the main part of campus. (Ta da!) Therefore, we ate there just about all the time our first year. There were two other dining hall options.
 
Bar-H, the housing unit way up on the East side of campus by the Field House, had its own eatery. I tried it one time in my entire five-year stay at RPI, when I was up that way following a group project meeting around dinnertime, sophomore year. My life long penchant for perfect timing reared its head, as that was the day they had bad mayonnaise. The next morning, Jesse learned the answer to the philosophical question, “If your oversized roommate falls in the bathroom and there's no one there to hear it, does he make a sound?”  

(Answer- Yes, a very loud thud, and some random unpleasant other noises.)
 
I had the shakes for most of the day and recovered by the evening. This would be why my Bar-H dining was limited to a single visit.
 
When we moved to the E-Dorms the following year, the ancient building naturally had no dining hall of its own. However, it put us in close proximity to the Russel Sage dining hall in the center of the hoity-toity Quad dorms. Having an overall smaller capacity allowed for an increase in quality. Sage wasn’t open on weekends, but both dining establishments had some shared idiosyncrasies.
 
There were a huge amount of beverage selections. For the multiple hot choices, which I didn’t drink at the time, there were tea cups. For the vast array of juices, sodas, and milks, there were small glasses that looked remarkably, and unsettlingly, like specimen jars. Our trays normally held three or four on them for a standard meal. Mostly I stuck with skim milk, being a lifelong milk drinker up until my thirties when suddenly one glass would cause me to produce more natural gas than Texas and Oklahoma combined. As a Pepsi concession, the free flowing Mountain Dew available gave me normal college student levels of caffeine in my system. I’d otherwise be deficient in that area as a non-coffee drinker.

 
Aside- I drank coffee exactly once in college. While I originally entered RPI to major in Aeronautical Engineering, well before declaring was required I knew I was going Mechanical. However, there was overlap in the courses. I couldn’t fit the Mechanical Engineering structures course in my schedule at the start of junior year, and therefore took the Aero version instead. Every major had a class or two designed to weed out those who weren’t serious about that selection. For Aeros however, it was ALL OF THEM. For this structures course, I was doing hours upon hours of reading and calculations every single night, and making absolutely no headway toward increasing my understanding of what should have been a basic building block of knowledge on top of subjects I took previously. It was approaching the weekend of the UMass at Amherst Juggling Festival, which the RPI Juggling Club visited every year. That was the school Nyra attended, and she helped by finding available floor space for travelling jugglers to sleep on. I was approaching needing to spend yet another full weekend doing only structures homework and nothing else. I participated in  much soul searching, and an equal amount of course offering reviews. With the results, I decided I could still graduate on time, swapping my planned six course and five course semesters around. I also decided the Juggling Festival (and by extension my sanity) was far more important than that stupid class. It was the only course I dropped in five years and two degrees at RPI. In order to go to the festival, (and do no homework that weekend) I needed to throw myself into overdrive to catch up and go beyond in the classes I had been ignoring to swear at structures problems. This included a Seven AM meeting with a project group in the McNeil Room of the Union the Friday morning the festival started. The meeting happened following multiple, very late, catch up nights. During our breakfast conversation, I grabbed a large coffee to keep me going from the attached cafeteria. This “large” would make Starbucks weep with feelings of size inadequacy for their hugest vessels. It required two hands to drink from properly, and was served in a Styrofoam cup capable of affecting the local ecosystem on its own. Needless to say, I was awake and alert for classes that day, the drive to UMass, the evening’s juggling…and the rest of the weekend. It was the only time I had the speed needed to consistently flash five balls. I have never come close again.

 

There was a peculiarity to those little specimen jars masquerading as glasses. We called it “the two bounce rule.” If one dropped a glass on the hard tile floors of the cafeterias, it would always bounce twice, spinning end over end in the air between each contact - up to a couple feet off the floor. (I’m positive this happened in slow motion.) If one could catch a glass in that 2001 like rotational period, it could be saved. If not it would explode into individual glass molecules on the third hit.
 
The exception to this was, oddly, if it fell off a static table rather than a tray being carried, it would smash immediately. Often, trays full of empty drinkware would be left near a window, with the curtain blowing back and forth, gently brushing the glasses until they’d drop, one at a time, in a Foucault pendulum of destruction.
 

The food was fine for what it was. Honestly, the variety and “all you can eat” element was fantastic for a hungry twenty year old. (Plus or minus two, to be engineery about it.) In addition, they excelled at some areas. The problem with those was the enforced portions. They made outstanding chicken nuggets with honey mustard that bordered on the drinkable. But, even if the place was empty (and I can tell you from experience, no matter how much I begged), they would only give out five nuggets on each pass. There were times I’d finish them waiting to clear the secondary part of the line while reviewing the comedy potential of Jell-O color selections and have to go back to the front of the queue again before sitting down.  Another fine offering came from Carmella at the Russel Sage sandwich counter. She was an artist of Arthur Dent proportions, and of the three meals, lunch was the one I was least likely to skip.
 
The Commons did excel in three areas. The first was the previously mentioned brunch. The second and third were tied to the fact that they had a flame grill instead of a sheet grill. Second was the three-cheese cheeseburgers they cranked out en masse, when touched up with fixin’s from the enormous double salad bar in the middle of the room, they were lovely.
 
The third came from combining that flaming grill with teenaged workers on the weekends who weren’t all that focused on their job. 

Everyone on the meal plan, once a month, could either get:
(1) A pizza from the Rathskellar in the basement of the Union,
Or
(2) A steak in the dining hall.
 
Given one choice was “Rat Pizza” the selection of steak was an easy one. After having a couple in Russell Sage, cooked far more than I wanted on the flat grill, something amazing happened. I let the month slip by and the last day was on a weekend. I ordered my steak for the Commons. The kid running the grill asked how I wanted it. I answered with my standard, “As rare as legally possible.”
 
I received a nearly raw hunk of meat with a flame encrusted outer coating.
 
OH YEAH!
 
I targeted my monthly steaks to the weekends for the remainder of my college career.
 
We all started dropping meals as soon as possible from our plans. Phase One for me was going to the fifteen meal plan. That worked as a reward system. For every day during the week I made it out of bed and to the dining hall for breakfast before class, it would be one extra time I could eat elsewhere on the weekend.
 
By the end of my RPI stay, I had downshifted to the ten meal plan. Breakfast was in room Cheerios after my trips to the gym. (Hour-long workouts made even the unflavored version quite tasty.) Additionally, I’d usually have other option food at least once during the week, to leave a Commons visit for brunch or a steak.
 
The selection of outside food always included Chinese. The cheapest was a standard, Counter Service place over by Price Chopper. Most times, I’d walk over to say howdy to Ben in the years he worked at Radio Shack next door. They also delivered, but that could lead to injuries.
 
A place downtown became our go to “dine in” Chinese food for several years. Sadly, I forget the name, but I’ll never forget the night my folks took Jesse and me there for dinner. Jesse ordered “Beef Amazing.” He then immediately decided if it were named “Beef Mediocre”, he would have been much less disappointed. Early on the owner sat at our table, and as the waitress got around to everyone, she saw him and dismissively said, “Oh, it’s you!!!” Later on in the night, he came over again with her because there was a mistake on one of the orders. He apologized for the error and said, “For this, I am fired.” The waitress added, “There will be no charge for that dish,” to which the owner hastily added, “And for that…you are fired.” This is also the locale I visited on my twenty-first birthday to have “Navy Grog” in a skull shaped cup. It is possible later that same evening, Lucas suggested I buy a bottle of Absolut and the two of us spent the night wandering around campus trying to hide in the shadows, Batman style…but it was a long time ago and and nothing can be proven.  (Thank the maker I went to college before everyone had a camera on them at all times.)
 
Later on, we discovered the Plum Blossom restaurant in the opposite direction from Downtown was a higher quality place, and we switched to there for dine-in Chinese. It sure was a lot less fun, though. That is, if one discounts that this was the location where Scott introduced us to the superstition that one shouldn’t pour their own tea. Given the large crowds that we ate with in there, I often wondered if he made that superstition up to cause entertaining physical interference reaching across the huge table over dinner.
 
The Polytechnic newspaper was great at stirring up arguments on its letters page. This happened in yet another back and forth that lasted for months after they ranked local Chinese restaurants. The arguments had nothing to do with the rankings, however. The article had stated “Food King” had an inauthentic name, but authentic food. The arguments went on and on, with one view championed by a guy explaining that there were provinces in China that sounded like “Foot” and “Keen” which matched the Chinese lettering on the sign under "Food" and "King." This continued for weeks, until the place changed its name to “Uncle Louie's Chinese Food,” effectively ending the argument.
 
One other (sadly no longer existing) restaurant I need to mention was “Holmes and Watson.” It had three things going for it that led us to regular visits.
A) Sherlock Holmes inspired décor and menu names.
B) Excellent sandwiches and similar type fare and sides.
C) An INSANE beer list, topping out well over a hundred selections.
 
Most of the weird beers I knew I liked before taking any trips to Atlantic City, from Xingu Black (a Brazilian concoction in a huge bottle) to Dinkelacker Dunkel (the smoothest of the German Darks) I learned about there.
 
The only place that is still surviving in Troy out of the restaurants and bars we frequented from ages past when I attended RPI is, ironically, the Friendly’s. This was host to a truly spectacular moment of karma. 

A bunch of us went for dinner on a Friday night. (Possibly due to a visit by Nyra, the self proclaimed "Queen of Friendly's.) Shortly after we were placed in a couple of adjoining booths, the line to be seated crossed the entire restaurant and extended out the door well into the parking lot. An Eighth Grade dance had just let out and the entire group of middle schoolers, decked out in rumpled, sweat stained formal wear descended on the Price Chopper strip mall. It looked and sounded like  a school cafeteria- yelling, carrying on, applause for dropped utensils, the works. There was one kid, who was clearly a class clown of the unpleasant, attention seeker variety. His obnoxious requests and commands to the wait staff could be heard over the rest of the din. At one perfectly timed junction, he thrust his hand skyward and partially stood up to make a point. This action connected with the tray of the sever on the other side of the divider from him, leading to the entire contents of the mix cup containing a chocolate Fribble to up-end onto his head. A massive cheer and ovation broke out from the crowd as it oozed down his face You Can’t Do That on Television style.
 
There was one final aspect to our eating habits. From when we started in Bray Hall, and throughout our E-Dorm days, Jesse had a can of Spam in the room. Whenever either of us was tempted to open it for a meal or a snack, we immediately walked or drove down to Price Chopper for a shopping trip.

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