What’s up guys, and welcome to “A Critic’s Take On Comms”. I am your host, critically acclaimed student, Aaron Mark and I will be reviewing Southwestern University’s favorite dining hall. 

First things first, Ms. Ella, am I right?? Ms. Ella is the best thing to come out of comms and it’s no competition at all. The dining hall staff are some of the sweetest people on campus, and the review I’m about to give is by no means a reflection of them. They show up for us everyday, and they deserve all of the love in the world. Enough of that, let’s actually get into it. 

Up first is breakfast, the most important meal of the day, so we need to get our energy up for all of our classes. If you’re anything like me, you need coffee to start your day. The mugs are small and there’s a disappointing lack of flavors or creamer, but at least there’s oatmilk and sugar packets, am I right guys? In all honesty, the coffee isn’t bad, this isn’t me saying it’s amazing, but just like Chappell Roan, it gets the job done. If coffee isn’t your thing, there’s also various types of tea. There’s also various cereals that are always sugary or a bit stale, and sometimes maybe even both. Waffles are also available, but just be warned there are limited toppings. I won’t be reviewing the omelets because I despise eggs, but omelets do in fact exist if you want to try for yourself. Usually the breakfast meat is sausage which is far too greasy, but occasionally they have bacon up for grabs, which is also far too greasy. The pancakes are…lacking and the biscuits are okay enough. Sometimes there’s yogurt, sometimes there’s fruit, and occasionally both coexist with the addition of granola. That’s the beautiful day you know you’ve made it. Now, I wasn’t too harsh on breakfast, mostly because I don’t care enough to grab more than a coffee and a biscuit, but just wait until lunch. 

For lunch and dinner, the meals begin to blend together in a sad dance of flavorless monotony. Think of the most boring people you know, and then put them in a relationship where they suck the whimsy out of each other and then just maybe you will understand lunch and dinner at comms. Every meal, without fail, are charred burgers and what frats on campus like to call “dry ahh chicken” Every. Single. Meal. This leaves one more option for us picky eaters, which is usually cheese quesadillas or grilled cheeses. Both are equally disappointing and room temperature. Let me set the scene for you. It’s 6:30 pm and you’ve just had the worst day. Your class ran long and then you had to sprint across campus to your next class, it’s obviously raining, and a car drove through a puddle and splashed you with cold dirty water. You had to skip lunch because you had so much work to do, but then your situationship sends you a text and you’re left to ponder that with your friends as they are trying to get you to talk to her. Finally, you are able to get some work done, but you can’t find any sources and then your computer dies. By this point, it’s dinner and all you want is a warm meal and a good cry. You swipe into the dining hall and walk to the back station where the comfort food lies, and there you see a sad, lifeless, pale, triangle of a tortilla filled with cheese that was only slightly melted. You have never felt so dejected as you look at the embodiment of your day in food form. Anyways, enough of my horror stories. Sometimes you get particularly lucky with a chicken nugget day, which is saying a lot because one time I bit into a nugget and it was completely hollow. You’ve heard about the five stages of grief, but let me tell you about the five stages of chicken nuggets. The first and most likely stage is cold, but you get used to that quickly, because let’s be so honest, almost everything you eat here for the next four years will be cold. The second stage is rubber, which is where the nugget has a texture that makes every neurodivergent person (me) have a crisis. The third stage is the crunch, but not in the good way, never in the good way. The fourth stage is hollow, seriously, I cannot make this up. The fifth and final stage is what I like to call “meh”, where you just have to accept that this is what your life is destined to be. Enough of the dread, someday, some glorious day they show us mercy and give us the magnum opus of comms food: egg rolls. Never in my life did I think I would sing the praises of egg rolls, but here I am. They’re honestly not even that amazing, but they’re usually warm, and that’s all that matters. 

I believe this one thing deserves its own section just because it has built a reputation. That, my friends, is rice. You may think to yourself “oh it’s rice, that’s hard to mess up”. Wrong. You have never been more wrong. The rice is crunchy and hard and lacks any amount of the softness we know in rice. When you can individually pick out grains of rice without them sticking to each other, that’s how you know the situation is dire. There is not enough malice in the world for rice, and I stand by that. 

The pizza bar exists, and much like the rice, they do somehow mess it up despite it being incredibly simple. One time I found a thread stuck in my undercooked pizza crust, and I think that’s all you need to know. As an Italian person, the pasta is offensive to my culture. There once was a time where I watched a guy poke the baked pasta with a spoon and he was so dejected that he immediately turned around and left the dining hall. He is me, I am him, and I understand that experience on a personal level. 

Onto the desserts, I only have one word to describe them: Dry. The cake is like eating sadness wrapped in frosting. The cookies are mid, the brownies are mid, and occasionally they have other desserts that are, you guessed it, mid. Perhaps once a week we are blessed with a dessert that is actually worth getting, but never fear, there is always something that can save the day. The soft serve machine. Freshman, as your elder I must tell you the horror story from last year where the soft serve machine was broken for months. The day it returned was a day that the entire student body was brought together more than any SUnity Day event could. We were a family, we were #besouthwestern.  

Now, I wanted to really dig into comms and give my utmost unfiltered opinions, but this is a student newspaper of a school that I attend, and unfortunately, I am not allowed to swear. As much as I want to channel my inner Gordon Ramsey and call someone a donkey, no one deserves that, and the people that did would never read my silly little article. Maybe I was too harsh, maybe I wasn’t harsh enough, but nonetheless, thanks for being here. Until next time, this has been “A Critic’s Take On Comms”.