The Grillworks restaurant is adorned with Edison light bulbs and what Cox calls “Grandma tiling,” meant to mimic the comfort of a classic American dining experience. Nothing in the “top eight” food allergies - soybeans, peanuts, milk, wheat, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts - makes it past the register. Inclusive Solutions is the campus’s only dining venue dedicated to allergen-free cooking, where students with certain food sensitivities work directly with dining staff to pick out their meals. in Effingham and Café la Crumb, featuring pastries and brew, with the theme “Coffee is Life and Life is Good” emblazoned on an adjacent wall. Then there’s breakfast spot Rise and Dine, with a butcher-block tabletop made by John Boos & Co. The Grains and Greens installation near the entrance serves custom bowls, salads and soups, modeled after a popular metro restaurant. The dining staff visited over 50 restaurants for inspiration the dining hall’s 85 full- and part-time staff and 300 student employees now serve the results to the 4,000-plus visitors that flood it each day. That’s nearly twice the seats it had pre-makeover, which is now enough for the UI to stake its claim as the largest non-military college cafeteria in the U.S.Įvery installation in the three-year project is imbued with a few layers of artistic significance, meant to resonate with different demographics of students.

The campus’s new flagship dining hall seats up to 1,385 at its nine themed “micro-restaurants” - from demonstration kitchen Table 1867 (named for the year the UI was founded) to the eastern hemisphere appeal of Fusion 48 (the same number of Asian countries in the United Nations).

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