Food for Thought
A new dining option on campus
By Courtney Humphries

A new student-designed cafe aims to bring a little social interaction and health consciousness to the culture of grab-and-go eating at MIT. The Steam Cafe, located on the fourth floor of Building 7, emphasizes nutritious food and customer feedback on its menu.

The cafe is the brainchild of architecture graduate student Scott Francisco, who wanted to bring the concepts of open-source software--in which programmers share and build on each other's ideas--to food service on campus. He and fellow architecture grad student Nick Senske, both of whom are part of the student research group Culture Lab, have worked to make eating at MIT a meaningful experience rather than a chore performed between bouts of work.

For the Steam Cafe, that means giving customers a stake in the menu and a connection to the space. The menu changes based on customer feedback and the submission of recipes to the cafe's website (steamcafe.mit.edu). The space, designed and built by student volunteers, also maximizes opportunities for interaction, with benches that are shared between tables and a computer connected to a large plasma display. "It's about architecture being able to catalyze change," Francisco says, rather than design for its own sake.

The Steam Cafe is also uniquely focused on nutrition. The menu is based on brown rice and other whole grains, with healthy vegetarian and meat entrees, as well as soups, salads, and beverages. Customers weary of supersized meals will also welcome the choice of three portion sizes.

The students won support for the project from the administration and from the Office of Campus Dining and its corporate partner, Sodexho, which operates the cafe. James Gubata, operations director for Sodexho at MIT, helped bring the project to fruition and now plans the cafe menus, guided by feedback from customers. He believes that the cafe's innovations can serve as a model for other sites. For Gubata, it was important to show that healthier food can be cost effective: during the first two months of operation, sales in the space--previously occupied by the Dome Cafe--more than doubled.