For when you’re feeling PO’ed at Plaza, the Student Center offers a wide variety of fresh food options that are made mostly from scratch.
Eric Cartwright, the executive chef of Campus Dining Services, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the six restaurants in the Student Center’s main level.
This is the second installment in a six-week series. Each week, we’ll explore a new place to eat in the Student Center. This week, we’re discussing **Infusion,** the coffee shop and bakery, which offers tea, chai, lattes and various breads and pastries.
All the coffee at Infusion, and at all dining halls across campus, is roasted right behind the counter.
“If you’re standing at the cash register, there’s a big brown thing with a big bowl on top — it’s a coffee roaster,” Cartwright says. “We usually do it in the evenings, about two nights a week. The coffee there we roast also for all the dining halls on campus. We get in green (coffee) beans from a company we work with. If you go eat at Plaza, at Rollins, The Mark or Dobbs, the regular coffee you get there is all roasted by Infusion.”
For a limited time, Cartwright says, a pumpkin spice latte is available with a homemade flavored marshmallow made from scratch in the Student Center.
The doughnuts are fried fresh every day, and all the other pastries are also either baked or made by hand.
“The scones and cookies — we buy a frozen dough, but we bake them fresh,” Cartwright says. “But if you get the apple turnover, for that, we start with apples and we cook them down with brown sugar and butter and cinnamon and spices, and then we take puff pastry and we fill those and we fold them and we bake them off. We do those completely in-house.”
Cartwright also recommends getting the freshly squeezed orange juice.
“We have a machine there that we literally put whole fresh Florida juice oranges in there, and it splits them in half and squeezes them,” he says. “It’s as fresh as it gets. It’s pretty awesome.”