Mashuda dining hall will swipe its last round of meals May 10. The retro dining hall will close due to Wild Commons’ 24 hour service, accommodating more than 890 students.
“We built a dining room, a state of the art dining room, across the street in Wild Commons,” Rick Arcuri, Marquette’s executive director of Business Operations and Auxiliary Services, said. “When we developed our contract, we decided that McCormick was closing and we would close Mashuda as well because (Wild) is right across the street.”
Twice the size of McCormick’s dining hall, Wild Commons will have a barbecue pit, a smokehouse, an allergy station, a bakery and a salad bar, among other options.
“Like how Marquette Place is in little segments, make it five times bigger, where it’s a community,” Donato Guida, operations director of university dining services, said.
“Given what we are doing in Wild Commons, I don’t think people will be disappointed that they aren’t dining in Mashuda,” Arcuri said.
Freshman in the College of Communication Alex Celis said otherwise. Celis said on a scale of 1-10 of disappointment, he is a 10.
Celis goes to Mashuda so often that the workers know his order.
“I’ll miss the food and the people the most, also the environment,” Celis said.
Jack Eddinger, a freshman in the College of Engineering, said the dining hall should not close if it does not have to.
“If you close Mashuda, you lose variety of where to eat on campus,” Eddinger said.
Eddinger has Mashuda in his housing preferences for next year, but the dining hall closing does not change his mind.
Like most students, Eddinger has yet to see Wild Commons, but he is concerned about the amount of people Wild Commons will have to feed.
“I feel like it might be a bit taxing on one place,” he said.
Arcuri said the Wild Commons dining room will be home to a comfortable number of people, and it will have vibrant life all the time.
“When you think about what we are doing, we are taking McCormick and taking those people over, adding a hundred or so to that in that building alone. You have O’Donnell across the street, you’ve got Mashuda another half block away and Humphrey right there. You’ve now loaded the West side of campus,” Arcuri said.
Though the location of the new dining hall is on the west side of campus and not centered like McCormick, Arcuri said it is not impossible for students to get there.
“I don’t think students will shy away from it because of where it is located,” Arcuri said.
Next month, the advisory board will conduct a meeting where there will be potential talks of making Cobeen or Straz 24 hours as well.
“It’s a contractual thing. Adding those, it’s actually like another day and half almost to a schedule. You have to pay for that somehow. If we did that, then you as a student will see that in your meal plan rate,” Arcuri said.
Mashuda dining hall will have a last goodbye celebration that students will hear about soon, Guida said.
“We’ll be doing drawings and things like that, a thank you for the run,” Guida said.
