The quality of dining services is often linked to quality of life for resident students at St. John’s University.

As inconsistencies at Montgoris grew troublesome, Sodexho rebounded with many improvements. While college food is rarely good, Sodexho is now at least attempting to improve their dining services.

Since the broken dishwasher in Montgoris has been fixed, the disposable tableware has disappeared, and clean dishes have once again materialized. The availability of utensils, however, remains a problem, as it seems more often than not, knives and spoons are hard to come by.

Eating ice cream with a fork is never fun.

Furthermore, Sodexho rebounded from its problems by offering detailed descriptions of the available food for each respective mealtime. This is a nice additional feature, as it gives residents a greater understanding of what is being served.

Hopefully, these descriptions will include foods people actually want to eat. The repeated serving of goulash this year is questionable, whereas the recent re-appearances of food options from last year have been widely welcomed back into residents’ diets.

Most notably, the serving of grilled chicken was a pleasant surprise for many students. Since the start of the school year, Sodexho optioned to serve fried chicken patties instead. This disheartened many people who had, as of last year, relied on grilled chicken as a healthy option. Now, it is once again a popular item.

Sodexho also added skim milk to its repertoire. Sadly, this led to the disappearance of ready-made chocolate milk. The flux of options is helpful, but many people wonder why there is the option of two similar milk options: two percent and whole, yet there is no chocolate milk. This is just another example of the kinks in Sodexho’s system slowly working themselves out.

The availability of a separate vegetarian entree has also emerged. This appears to be a genuine attempt by Sodexho to service all resident students equally. Now, choosing to not eat meat does not always have to mean grilled cheese sandwiches and plain pizza.

Many of the problems in Montgoris are not the fault of the employees, but of the higher-ups. When the register stops working and employees are forced to write down card numbers instead of scanning, it’s the lower end employees who are stuck dealing with the problems, even though they are usually not at fault.

The evolvement of Sodexho continues, and the improvements appear to be more lasting and, for many, satisfying.