To continue to push sustainability on campus, Cornell Dining partnered with Ithaca's famed Moosewood Restaurant to create a sustainable, vegetarian campus café. Victor Younger, general manager of retail dining for the university, speaks about the importance of offering sustainability focused concepts on campus.
For the past two years, Cornell University Dining has made sustainability a focus for the Ithaca community. But Ithaca had already been on the sustainable dining map for more than 30 years because of its famous resident, the Moosewood Restaurant. This fall, Cornell Dining partnered with Moosewood to open Moosewood at Anabel Taylor. Victor Younger, general manager of retail dining, talks about adapting Moosewood’s time-tested sustainable concept for his campus community.
“We were interested to see if we had a market that would support a 100% sustainable restaurant. With Moosewood, we had in our backyard one of the best concepts. We met with them to learn more about providing a healthy and sustainable concept. To our surprise they were interested and ready to test their concept in a larger venue.
It was interesting for us, one of those ‘ah- ha’ moments. We were thinking about converting an older venue into a healthy eating venue, we were thinking ‘ok, let’s develop a menu,’ and then we said ‘oh, wait a minute, we have one of the best vegetarian and sustainable restaurants in the country right downtown.’ It has been very successful. In the old concept, our daily counts averaged 40 to 50 customers per day. Moosewood at Anabel Taylor has built a following of 125 to 150 customers per day, a complete turnaround.
We source as many of the locally grown products as we can and the beverages are also all locally produced. The thing that really jumped out at us was the fact that you can still have some very flavorful sandwiches without meat. We found so many opportunities, through Moosewood, for our own recipes. We learned that you could create a wide variety of products that can expand the options for a vegetarian, vegan and organic product line. Moosewood just opened up the doors as to what those techniques were.
The menu is all organic and vegetarian or vegan. We have items like the B.L. Tease, which has all the flavors of a BLT but uses tofu. Moosewood’s staff was able to point out items on our menu and show us how to make it vegan. They really broadened our awareness about those things. We’re also learning how to be sustainable as an entire unit. It’s challenging but it can be done. We’re learning that when you set up the venue with that mindset, people really respond to it. I’ll be the first to tell you, I’m a meat eater without question. But when I go into that café, I’m in that mindset and I want to be responsible in what I do, so I’m thinking about all the options I have and how I dispense my products. It’s an educational process to the consumer.
We selected Moosewood’s most popular sandwiches and salads from their menu and they were able to help us make sure we had the best options based on feedback from their customers. We had already made a campus-wide commitment to buy as many locally grown products as possible, so we incorporated that program into the new venue. We had been doing biodegradable pilot programs at one of our larger eateries and we carried that theme into the Moosewood café. However, we did take it one step further by using biodegradable utensils as well.
[For those who’d like to try something similar], if you have a vegetarian style restaurant that sells quality food, which is what Moosewood is known for, don’t reinvent the wheel. Use them as an option and try and learn what they do and replicate it if you can. Also, send your chefs to sustainability conferences and educate your staff on sustainability. It is truly a change in how you do business.”