At Rutgers University’s campus in Newark, N.J., the dining team, managed by Gourmet Dining, has been battling food insecurity for many years.
“The mission of the school is to create opportunities for students, and we saw that we needed to also create the same opportunities for them to dine,” says Michael DiGirolomo, president of Gourmet Dining at Rutgers-Newark.
The school had developed ways for students to access affordable meals on campus, including a food pantry, but when DiGirolomo and a co-worker saw about 100 students in line for the pantry when walking by one day, he knew they had to go further.
“We kind of just looked at each other, and I'm like, ‘We got to come up with something better. There's such a need here,’” he says.
Starting small
DiGirolomo challenged his staff to come up with a better solution. After one of his co-workers visited JBJ Soul Kitchen, a pay-it-forward restaurant with two New Jersey locations created by singer Jon Bon Jovi and his wife, Dorothea Hurley, the team thought a third location might work well on campus.
The team reached out to Bon Jovi’s JBJ Soul Foundation and invited them to visit. After seeing the need for themselves, Bon Jovi and Hurley were confident that Rutgers-Newark would be able to open JBJ Soul Kitchen at a college for the first time. But first, the dining team decided to test how the restaurant’s unique setup would work in the university environment.
I'm like, ‘We got to come up with something better. There's such a need here.'—Michael DiGirolomo
“We got buy-in from [Bon Jovi and Hurley] right away, but we wanted to just see how it works with the student volunteers and then [see] if we would have enough paying guests to make the model work,” DiGirolomo says.
As a pay-it-forward restaurant, there are no prices listed on JBJ Soul Kitchen’s menu. Instead, diners are invited to donate a meal swipe, pay a suggested minimum donation of $12 or volunteer their time at JBJ Soul Kitchen after their meal. The restaurant has a staff of four permanent employees and can accommodate up to 20 student volunteers per lunch shift.
Photograph courtesy of JBJ Soul Kitchen
Learning on the job
First-time volunteers are eased into working at JBJ Soul Kitchen, and as students get more comfortable, they can be trained on other skills such as table service and helping out in the kitchen. “We're starting very basic. Maybe you'll fold napkins for an hour, or you'll clean silverware,” DiGirolomo says. “The tables have a sheet of paper that goes over them, kind of like a rustic looking tablecloth, so you might be cutting tablecloths.”
Due to the high volume of students wanting to volunteer at JBJ Soul Kitchen, students can also volunteer to perform similar duties at other campus eateries. “If [students] decide, ‘Wow, I really like the foodservice industry,’ we can drop them into our Student Success Program, which would gear them towards actually gaining full-time employment with us,” he says.
Those who aren’t interested in a foodservice career can still benefit from working at the kitchen due to the fact that it’s open to the surrounding community, DiGirolomo says: “For example, the veterans’ courthouses are maybe three blocks away from this restaurant, and we've already had judges come in and dine, and they're talking to students. Maybe that's a connection there. Maybe they get to find out that those students are [studying] criminal justice or prelaw or something like that, and that can actually create employment opportunities as well.”
Making the menu
Diners at JBJ Soul Kitchen are served a three-course meal of either soup or salad, an entree and dessert. Originally, the dining team was planning to use only recipes sourced from the other two JBJ Soul Kitchen locations; however, once the restaurant’s team saw the culinary talent on campus, they gave freer rein for menu development.
“They felt comfortable with our culinary level that we can kind of come up with things together,” DiGirolomo says. “We speak with their chefs and share recipes.”
JBJ Soul Kitchen’s menu changes weekly based on whatever ingredients are local and in season. Recent dishes have included maple-roasted chicken and black bean soup. When coming up with menu items, the campus executive chef works closely with the campus dietitian, who signs off on each dish to make sure that diners are getting a healthy, balanced meal.
DiGirolomo says that Gourmet Dining is open to working with the JBJ Soul Foundation to expand the concept to other schools around the country. “We want to make sure this is successful first,” he says. “But it’s our goal—and Jon and Dorothea’s goal—to put this in as many campuses as we can.”