WVU Hospitality Group held three ribbon cutting ceremonies across campus dining halls on Wednesday to welcome new dining options from a collaboration between Elior Collegiate Dining and Fabio Viviani Hospitality.
This collaboration comes with the addition of eight new dining restaurants and dining hall updates. Fabio Viviani, celebrity chef and founder of Fabio Viviani Hospitality, said he hopes to bring a heightened dining experience for all.
“From Italian to Mexican, pizza, pasta, allergen-free, Greek, sandwiches, all the stuff that normal folks outside of the University campus and outside of the student body and staff would get downtown anywhere in a big city or in a fun spot, and we are bringing it to campus,” Viviani said.
Mountaineer Mascot Cade Kincaid said he has enjoyed this year’s dining changes.
“I didn’t use the dining hall a lot my freshman year, which was three years ago, but now that I’m back on a dining plan, I’ve been able to use the Hatfields dining hall more than I did in previous years and it’s been an amazing experience,” Kincaid said. “It reflects a better experience for incoming and current students, and it gives the opportunity for current students to think about going back to a dining plan instead of cooking on their own because we have more options.”
The renewed interest in campus dining reflects a broader shift in hospitality, one that the University and its new dining partners say is intentional.
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“We’re not putting profit over kids. We want to give you guys a great meal. We want you to enjoy it. We wanna give you great service, and if we do that and participation goes up, we all win,” Travis Young, senior president of education for Elior North America, said. “But seeing people walking around and seeing people happy, that’s what I’m looking for. I mean, we are gonna revolutionize the way that campus dining is and the way that you are gonna be because what you were given was abysmal”
This year, students can also use Grubhub online for pickup. Vice President of Operations for WVU Hospitality Darius Peacock and Young said they hope to implement “robot food delivery” on campus.
“But sometime in the future, we don’t know when it’s gonna be, but we will eventually have the little robots delivering food around campus,” Young said. “We just gotta find one that can walk up hills. … We’re thinking with snow it could be challenging, but if we can figure that out it will be kind of cool,” Peacock said.
A full list of new dining shops can be found here.
Students can give feedback on their dining experience by visiting dining.wvu.edu. Viviani said that a QR code and text option for feedback are in progress.
Dining and Cooking