stu2010

Food Is Awful, Chartwells Staff Is Rude

The dining options are Bard are really bad. Often I enter the main dining hall, Kline, and walk around all of the food stations, seeing absolutely nothing appealing and grabbing a bagel. Talk about Freshman 15- there is way too much fried food, and they use corn syrup in their cooking. There are jugs of corn syrup in the kitchen. Cooked veggies are drenched in oil, and chicken is tasteless. I've gotten hair in my food on numerous occasions, and a massive fly once or twice in the pasta. Management almost never listens to our complains or suggestions, and the staff that works for Chartwells is ridiculous. We put comments and suggestions on a board and the woman that writes the responses is cynical and almost always says no to all of our requests. I don't understand why the CHEFS don't read our suggestions, after all, management isn't doing the cooking- just the ordering of ingredients (and they get whatever is cheapest and least healthy for us). We are forced to be on a meal plan if we live on campus, and get strawberries once a year if we are lucky. We use meal/id cards to enter the dining hall, and there are some staff members that are so rude. I forgot my card once and was given an incredibly hard time for forgetting it, even though I am PAYING for the full meal plan. I had other id, they looked me up and let me in to eat, but they were absolutely obnoxious in helping me. There is no sense of courteousness, they just assume every student is lying and trying to 'sneak' into their god awful dining hall. They need some friendlier people working in their office. They started the semester with some better quality ingredients (even had baked salmon a few times and ribs) but then it quickly deteriorated again. If I had known how awful the food was going to be at Bard, and more importantly how mean staff is, I would have never gone to this college.