Alex Gervais ’28
Managing Editor
Over the summer, Trinity College Dining expanded hours and offerings at some of its locations. Hours were extended at the Bistro to 9:00 pm on Thursday, Friday and Sunday and retail at the Cave is newly open from 11:30am-5:00pm.
The Bistro also underwent major aesthetic upgrades to match campus branding and added a station called Chef’s Corner, a rotating offering currently serving customizable pastas under the name Ciao Bella; it will later change into a Tex-Mex and then an Asian fusion style offering on a rotating schedule. Dining also expanded smoothie offerings at Bistro, adding acai and sorbet, along with more topping options, and is planning to install a new milkshake station in the coming weeks.
The Cave added new items in its retail section, now offering grab-and-go hot options during lunch and household items like health and beauty products, although those household goods cannot be purchased using swipes or meal dollars, only Bantam Bucks and outside payment methods.
These changes represent the most noticeable upgrades to dining at Trinity since the renovation of Mather Hall, reopening with a new look in the Fall of 2023. That series of upgrades brought unlimited dining to Mather, increased seating options and an end to QR code based ordering that was held-over from COVID.
The College’s first-year meal plan now costs $7,180 for a full year of unlimited dining, up from $6,940 in the prior academic year, representing a 3.4% increase. Trinity’s meal plan is slightly cheaper than Connecticut College’s $7,848 plan, the only other Chartwells school in the NESCAC.
The Tripod sat down with Campus Director of Culinary Martin Turcotte and Residential District Manager Jenny Nelson to discuss the recent additions to dining at Trinity and to understand what improvements come next.
The pair emphasized that student need was the guiding principle for these changes. “Most of these renovations are based around the survey results and what the students said they wanted,” said Nelson. She emphasized that Chartwells would continue doing outreach in partnership with the Student Government Association. SGA Co-President Sriram Jetty ’28 said in comment to the Tripod: “Once SGA elects a senate, our food committee will begin getting more data from students and hosting open campus talks to gauge what students on campus truly want. Additionally we have been trying to work with entrepreneurs on campus who are passionate about the space.”
Trinity CFO Scott Jordan struck a similar tone in a separate interview: “we’re able and willing to move to students’ needs and tastes.”
Nelson also highlighted better integration with Grubhub as a means of focusing on student experience, previewing a program that would “ideally” allow students to order on-campus locations through Grubhub and have it delivered to their dorm. This concept stemmed from the success of Bantam Bites, a student-led entrepreneurial effort that delivered on-campus food offerings to students’ doorsteps for a small fee.
She also emphasized that they were working closely with their marketing team to build out the line system at the Bistro: “we’re going to have a sign… ‘this way for True Burger, this way for pasta…’ We don’t want you waiting in line for a burger if you just want pasta. So [it will help] differentiate.”
Turcotte also mentioned the soon-to-be rolled out Starbucks Kiosk that will be installed in the exterior part of the Cave, accessible to students around-the-clock. Turcotte highlighted the former partnership with Baronet Coffee, a local brand from South Windsor who previously ran a coffee kiosk on campus, but underscored that their lack of name recognition was responsible for their low sales. With the new Starbucks kiosk Turcotte hoped that “seeing a bunch of students walking around with the Starbucks cups on campus would certainly help us.”
The menu at Mather Hall remains largely dictated by the four-week cycle that comes down from Chartwells national management, although Turcotte emphasized that Trinity Dining has some leeway in what it wants to serve, specifically pointing to the Trinity-specific sausage gravy and biscuits that’s served every Wednesday: “If there’s signature items like that, or any other ones that have a lot of demand. We have the freedom of flexibility to add those in and keep them there.”
When asked about the evolving relationship between Chartwells and Trinity, Nelson said “it’s two entities, but at the end of the day, our goal is to be one.” Turcotte emphasized that assertion: “I can see that in the last couple years that the partnership between Chartwells and [the College] has only grown stronger… they’re able to leverage our expertise and our experiences to help improve certain things that they’re doing on campus, and we can do the same thing.”
