Themed nights by Dining Services such as “Cuisines of Africa” and “Congee Night” have polarized the student body. Some applaud these efforts to represent their home cuisines, imperfect as they may sometimes be. Others decry what they see as half-hearted attempts that fall short of satisfying their cravings. And of course, there is no formal metric for judging the success of these attempts: Do students want high quality or comfort? Authenticity or an American spin?
“I genuinely really, really hate it,” Rachel Aquino ’24 said of the taco fixings regularly served on Tuesdays at Whitmans’ dining hall. For her, the “Taco Tuesday” moniker is reductive, meant to stand in for all Mexican — and even all Hispanic — cuisine. It’s at once overly routine and frustratingly brief, she said, finding the weekly occurrence monotonous and tiring.
On the food quality, Aquino made a concession: “It’s a dining hall,” she said. “It’s not like I expect every dish to be Michelin-starred and delectable.”
It seems that Dining Services has been making efforts to expand its selection. Earlier this month, for instance, students witnessed the debut of “Oaxacan Street Foods” night at Driscoll Dining Hall, which featured foods from the Mexican region such as tlayudas — grilled flour tortillas — and pepita mole salsa.
Driscoll has also made versions of Asian cuisine that, for Elias Angulo Chen ’24, were a success.
“Driscoll’s South Chinese and Vietnamese food is surprisingly good,” Chen said. “I got into quarantine, and that’s the first thing I ate. It made me genuinely happy. It reminded me of home.” Chen also said he has a theory about food’s success. “They’ve definitely got a Cambodian or something back there,” he said.
Students’ complicated relationships to heritage food served at the College’s dining halls extend beyond the quality of the food into the way it’s presented to the broader community.
The way the dining halls advertise ethnic foods can at times detract from the comfort that students would otherwise feel from reminders of home. When Dining Services uses fun, attention-grabbing titles on flyers, foods that students eat regularly in their own kitchens are presented as novel or exotic, Rachel Cranston ’26 said.
“The way they advertise it feels like you’re making a cultural food more palatable or turning it into a theme,” she said. “For me, it’s just my culture. Here, the assumption is that real Americans don’t eat it that much.”
Chiaka Leilah Duruaku ’26 echoed this sentiment and expressed how jarring it can be to see the foods she considers to be staples made into a specialty night. For Duruaku, it’s stressful to see cultural food decontextualized and extracted from the intimate settings where it is usually consumed.
“Why is it that when students see jollof rice on the menu, they become anxious?” Duruaku asked. “When I imagine a bunch of fufu or egusi in these giant trays and people just scooping it up, it produces a feeling of fear. Nigerian food is something my dad makes — it’s something so intimate and so dear to my identity, and I think if I heard someone saying something insensitive about it, that would kill me.”
When ethnic food is done correctly, however, some students are enthusiastic and moved by the outcome — and not all are bothered by Dining Services designating certain nights for foods from around the world. Nick Skiera ’24, for example, strongly appreciated last week’s Korean night at Mission Park Dining Hall.
“It was fire,” he said.“It was one of the best meals I’ve had at Williams in a while. The dining halls should do cultural dinner nights more often.”
Like Skiera, many students appreciate the efforts that go into making and serving a specialty meal, regardless of the outcome. Duruaku acknowledged the importance of the work that dining staff does for the student body and emphasized that they’re not responsible for the occasional failures of Dining Services’s cultural offerings.
“It’s not about the actual human beings who work hours every day to create meals for the students,” she said. “And it’s not even about the people whose jobs are to create the menus. It seems like a lot of work that doesn’t garner a lot of praise… So I’m really not complaining about the actual people.”
Ultimately, finding representation through food at an institution like the College will be complicated, funny, joyful, and disappointing. The tensions of cultural cuisine at dining halls are in part inherent to the effects of marginalization.
For Shayla James ’24, the importance of food renders it a meaningful part of conversations about race at the College and the range of experiences that come with being a student of color at the College. Thus, accuracy and care should be part of Dining Services’s overall goal, she said.
“I think that the College diversifying dining at Williams offers a different perspective,” James said. “But the work shouldn’t be on students to see their cuisine represented well.”
