January 10, 2002
UW employees help Husky Den test new system
Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch? UW employees got one last week, in exchange for serving as guinea pigs for a new restaurant system. It was all part of the reopening of the Husky Den, which has been closed for renovations since last June.
UW employees received invitations to a special pre-opening lunch on Jan. 3 and 4, offering them free food in exchange for filling out a survey on their experience. About 1,300 of them took advantage of the offer.
“There really is no substitute for trying a system out,” said Dan Farrell, assistant director of Housing and Food Services (HFS), who coordinated the project. “We wanted to see what the traffic patterns were, how the queuing would work and whether all our equipment would function properly.”
The votes are in and the news is mostly good. Farrell and his colleagues have analyzed about 500 of the 900 surveys that were returned and so far 61.5 percent said the lunch exceeded their expectations and another 33.4 percent said it met their expectations. Only 5.1 percent of respondents thus far were less satisfied.
“Our main goals were to have people try more than one food station and to make as many cashier transactions as possible,” Farrell said. “That gave us the greatest opportunity to see how everything worked.”
Employees who attended were given “Den dollars” – play money bearing the faces of some HFS managers, including Farrell – and told to spend it wherever they wanted. There are six new food stations at the Husky Den, including Mexican food, Asian food, pizza, salad/soup bar, burgers and homestyle/pasta.
HFS hired an executive chef and several sous-chefs to create the new stations, Farrell said. “Improving the quality and variety of food – not only in the Den but across campus – has been our main goal.”
The Den also has more staff members now as a result of increasing the cashier stations from 12 to 30.
Farrell said some problems on the first day were resolved on the second by adding stanchions directing people where to form lines and by adding more cashiers. All in all, there were more than 2,000 transactions during the pre-opening. Farrell said it helped prepare his staff for the return of students this week.
“We had about 7,400 customers on Monday, which is about 1,800 more than we served last year on the first day of school,” Farrell said.
The food isn’t the only thing that’s changed in the Den. The whole area has been opened up and a variety of seating has been installed, from booths to counters with stools and regular tables and chairs. Farrell says that although the seating capacity is about the same as before, it is more efficient because there is more seating for small groups. Most of the old seating was in the form of large tables, where two or three people would sit and then no one wanted to fill in the other seats.
Although the Husky Den continues to be open this week, the official “grand opening” won’t happen until next week. There will be a ribbon cutting at 10 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 14, and entertainment most of that day as well as Jan. 15-17. On Thursday, Jan. 17, the entire HUB will be having an open house, with tours offered at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
