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and cold sandwiches, soups, pastries and bagels,” said Lura how to do that.”
Noyes, franchise operations manager with Spartan Shops. “We With the many regional variations on barbecue, Ptucha
have our bread and pastries delivered fresh everyday. They
serve Peet’s Coffee. We see a lot of faculty and staff at that challenged the culinary staff to come up with rub recipes
location, because it is a little bit pricier. It is on the higher to be used in the concept during its development. “We tried
end of our franchises.” them each on the meats and smoked them,” said Mattos. “We
had a lot of people from our offices and other units come by
The most recent franchise to open, as part of the last phase and taste them. We made a little contest out of it. The top two
of the renovation project, was Starbucks. “It is located sepa- favorites — one was a little spicy and the other a little sweet
rately from the food court,” she said. “It is in another part of — so we had them get together and combine their recipes.”
the building downstairs. It is the second-most popular next
to Panda Express when it comes to sales.” Eight typical barbecue sides are offered. “We have three
hot sides: mac and cheese, which is extremely popular, col-
The self-branded concepts in Union Square were also lard greens and baked beans, all of which we make in house
chosen based on student input. One
of the most popular is also the most
recent addition. The original surveys
from when the building was first be-
ing planned said that students wanted a
Mongolian Grill, but after its opening,
the location didn’t meet expectations
and the decision was made to replace it.

“Barbecue was chosen by a survey
that was done this past year,” said Ptu-
cha. “Barbecue in some form were two
out of the top three choices with Hawai-
ian Barbecue and traditional barbecue.
We rolled the Hawaiian barbecue into
one of the food trucks we have on cam-
pus, and we rolled a very large Southern
Pride smoker into the student union and
we are smoking all of our meats and
doing all of our sides daily. It has been
a really good success for us.”

Smokin’ Sammy’s offers four dif-
ferent smoked meats: brisket, pulled
pork, tri-tip and hot links. “We smoke
overnight and put more meat in in the
morning and pull it out at lunchtime,”
said Cecelia Mattos, retail operations
manager with Spartan Shops. “The meat
is fresh all day long. We are constantly
pulling out new product and slicing
it. We taught our students how to trim
the meat, and we make a rub. They
apply the rub and know how to load
the smoker and temp everything. It has
been fun to watch the students learn

ON-CAMPUS HOSPITALITY NOVEMBER 2016 | 15