On Sunday evening, Westlawn opened for dining, 415 days after it was shut down as part of broader renovations in the building. 

“Do you remember when we moved everything out of here?” President Rebecca Stoltzfus asked me, referencing a Saturday morning last September when Stoltzfus, along with other members of the faculty and staff, helped transition out of the dining hall into a temporary space in the Union building. 

Now, over a year later, Stoltzfus joined 214 other people to experience the renovated kitchen and updated dining hall. The rest of the building is currently expected to open at the start of next year, with nursing faculty moving into the upper floors after exams. 

Jeremy Corson, resident director of AVI Food Systems, said that the process of moving equipment over to the new space started a week before they reopened.

“Just moving this equipment [was a challenge],” he said. “It’s like moving into a house. Where do you put the furniture?”

Moving had to wait until after the kitchen passed the necessary inspections, a part of the process that Corson said ran on time. But the overall move still has its challenges. 

“There’s a learning curve right there,” Corson said on Tuesday —several days after the new kitchen had opened — pointing to two employees crouched by a new oven, troubleshooting something that wasn’t working. 

In the dining room itself, not much has changed for juniors and seniors who remember the space before it was renovated. The biggest changes come from the repainted ceiling — white instead of dark purple — and the new outdoor seating. 

Silas Immanuel, a senior accounting and film production major, said, “I really like what they did with the inside place. Making it more white just makes it feel less like you’re going into a dungeon and more like, ‘Oh, this is a nice place where you wanna eat.’ And the outside spot is a really good addition.”

The dining room still has some buffett equipment to be installed and a few small electrical things, but is mostly functional, according to Corson. 

“We’re gonna work on some of the aesthetics because it’s very clean looking,” Corson said. “So we have some graphics planned for some of the equipment and just to, you know, brighten it up with some color. There’s a lot of white, but it’s cool because it keeps everybody conscious of cleanliness.”

Maille Goodwill, a first-year social work and ASL interpreting double major, and Al Gabrielson, a first-year English major, sat together at a recent dinner and offered some observations on the new space. 

“I like the subtleness of the purple,” Gabrielson said. “It’s our school color, but you wouldn’t know it.”

“There’s a lot of different areas for food,” she added, “it’s kind of scaring me. It’s overwhelming.”

Goodwill said, “I like how big it is. I like that there’s more food now, and options if you don’t want the main thing.”

Corson’s favorite thing about the new kitchen is the functionality. 

“From receiving, to where our food is, we have our whole staff together,” he said. “Being split up is not good for communication.”

“We had walls in between us before … but now we can see it all. We can hear it all. The [workers] see what’s coming … it’s the functionality.”

Corson summed it up well:

“It worked really well beforehand,” he said. “It was a good kitchen. But now it’s better.”