Diana’s dull dining options fail to please discerning students

All bare, minimalist lines and pulsating red space, the new Diana Center café strives for modernism but feels akin to a hospital cafeteria. If only the food tasted better than institutional, Columbia students might still find a reason to drift over from Ferris Booth. Unfortunately, the Diana Center’s awkwardly quasi-fresh options consistently underwhelm, making this food court an utter waste of dining dollars.

Within the strangely sanitized and claustrophobic café, different stations offer salads, grilled items, macaroni and cheese, hot sandwiches, and thin-crust pizza. Overall, the culinary theme bends toward Italian, with background influences from American diner cuisine and Aunt Sally’s stale casserole that no one ever wants to eat.

Not surprisingly, the salad bar appears the only non-prefabricated choice. A collection of mundane greens and uninspired toppings, the salad bar seems almost a sideways joke, something to distract the eye and chuckle at momentarily while reaching for a just-grilled burger.

With regard to that grill, the Barnard Dining Services website asks students, “Hear that sizzling?” Actually, no. Because dozens of precooked sandwiches lie festering under heat lamps, the sole sound reaching students’ ears is a disturbing quiet.

Similarly, macaroni and cheese comes already scooped into foil dishes, a quick and easy selection for diners anxious to escape the café’s operating-room atmosphere. Setting into a gluey conglomerate of damp noodles and sodden cheese, each individual portion looks barely enough to sate the average collegiate appetite, let alone the ravenous surgeons the café’s architects clearly expect.

Following an obvious trend, sandwiches rest stacked behind glass awaiting a finishing trip to the panini press. Honestly, these sandwiches taste absolutely acceptable, however dull and dated the panini concept feels in 2010.

Thin-crust pizza seems like the café’s biggest risk—a brick oven has been installed, complete with dancing flames. Yet, the café constructs each pie ahead of time, dozens of disks already covered with a set list of toppings slid into metal racks. When a student orders a particular variety—ranging from tomato basil to barbecue chicken to Mediterranean—the cook simply locates the correct version and slides it into the furnace’s gaping jaws.

Mediterranean pizzas feature kalamata olives, tomatoes, onions, and mozzarella atop vibrant green pesto sauce. While a crisp crust holds up well against such a vegetable overload, oil leaks freely from the pesto, coating fingers and pizza alike in a smeary mess. The olives provide a delectable saltiness to the pale pink and watery tomato hunks that float sadly in their own bland juices.

Although the Diana Center café tries to bring Barnard dining into a new decade, the cafeteria remains mired in a recession mindset, complete with cheap comfort eats and an economically designed food service system. For such a modern space, students might expect more forward-thinking food.