College Try
University of San Francisco gets dining areas befitting its location
By Scott Hume, Executive Managing Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 8/15/2004
The University of San Francisco (USF) had new tools for recruiting this fall’s freshman class: two stylish and appealing dining areas.
The 4,700-student school’s 55-acre campus is in the heart of a city known for the quality and diversity of its dining options. However, the college’s foodservice facilities didn’t reflect those surroundings. Now, after a two-phase, multiyear renovation, USF has some of the feel of San Francisco’s restaurant scene.
The commercial ambience the dining areas sport is the real deal: USF brought in Puccini Restaurant Group, which has designed several high-end area restaurants—including Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants’ Ponzu and Puccini & Pinetti—as well as other hotel restaurants around the world. USF was Puccini’s first noncommercial client.
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The collaboration began with the redesign of The Market, the main dining room in USF’s University Center. That was completed in late 2002 and proved so successful that the university asked Puccini to work on Crossroads, a 4,500-square-foot student-run cafe in the basement below The Market. The Crossroads project, completed last November, was more extensive because it was a total re-imagining of the space and because it brought together the university, Puccini and foodservice contractor Bon Appétit Management Co., all of whom had ideas about what could and should be done.
“Normally, we work with an owner who has an idea of what he wants or has no idea at all, and that’s fine. We can work with that,” says Bob Puccini, president and CEO of the San Francisco-based design company. But with Crossroads “we were dealing with two customers [USF and Bon Appétit], which made it more difficult, but I think everyone is happy with the results.”
Tom Costello, associate professor and director of USF’s hospitality management program, who worked as a consultant on the renovation, knows Puccini from California Restaurant Association activities and was instrumental in bringing in the design firm. He says the Crossroads renovation was especially tricky because of the section’s status as a student-run operation.
“Frankly, Crossroads was a dive. Students hung out there because it was the only place to do so,” he says. “By definition, the University Center should be the place where students want to go. We wanted students there at all times.”
Proactive Management
Crossroads also was a money-loser. Costello and Terry Stoner,
USF vice president for human resources, first needed to convince
student-government organizations “that they couldn’t
continue to run it,” he says. “We wanted students
involved, but Crossroads needed professional management.” Students
continue as workers and supervisors, but Bon Appétit provides
operational and financial oversight.
Between completion of the upstairs Market dining room and the downstairs Crossroads, USF put its foodservice account up for bid, resulting in a switch from Sodexho USA to Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bon Appétit. That was an integral part of what Costello says was a proactive decision to assume tighter control of its dining operations.
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“The university drove the quality initiatives. We said we’ll pay for it and we’ll own it,” says Costello. “Too often, universities end up being Monday morning quarterbacks, letting others call the signals [on foodservice facilities]. We had to own it—the good, the bad and the ugly— if we were going to make changes.”
The redesigned Crossroads is “a grand slam,” says Costello. New lighting and color on walls make it brighter and more appealing. At one end is a modernized version of the student-run cafe, a long counter where made-to-order sandwiches, ice cream, espresso and other beverages can be ordered.
At the room’s opposite end is a pizza-and-pasta station with a deck oven. Previously, USF had an exclusive arrangement with a nearby Extreme Pizza unit for deliveries to the University Center. That was scrapped, replaced by the school’s own pizza shop (where dough is made from scratch), which Bon Appétit operates.
What Costello calls “prison-drab” furniture was replaced with commercial-style seating, including small tables and banquettes along the walls. Pillars were sheathed to add texture and color.
In place of what had been one dreary money-losing cafe are now two successful retail operations. Although not open for a full school year, Crossroads’ cafe and pizza shop still brought in 43% more revenues in 2003-2004 than had the old cafe the previous year.
“The great thing about Bob [Puccini] is that he has marvelous sensitivity,” says Costello. “We’ve given the students the sense that we’ve gone upscale and given them a place to hang out.
“He hit the right tone. It’s not too sophisticated, because if it was, students wouldn’t feel comfortable. But the perception of quality and style is there.”
Signs of Change
Puccini says that while the multiple constituencies that needed
to be involved—students, administration, faculty, staff
and contractor—made USF somewhat unlike most of his commercial
design projects, the tools used to solve problems were familiar.
“The university wanted the dining areas to have vitality, to reflect the restaurant [culture] of the community and the diversity of foods. We did just what we try to do with commercial restaurants,” he says. Upstairs in The Market, that meant maximizing use of natural light, with drama added through color and signage.
“I have a daughter in college, so I considered what I thought she would want in an environment. People today are more into color and displays and we tried to create something that was a little more cutting-edge and with more style.”
Two new food stations—a deli and an extensive salad bar—were created upstairs in The Market dining room. Both stations are cashless, allowing students to pay with a swipe of a campus debit card. Costello says the university expects to have all campus foodservice cashless by next summer. Additional freestanding stations are planned to give the dining hall a marketplace ambience.
The upstairs stations required investment of about $300,000 each, but some of the most effective improvements were not the greatest expenses. Whimsical signage gives the sandwich station a “North Beach deli” personality, Puccini says. The area where diners returned trays and tableware was transformed by making a kinetic sculpture of a giant dish, knife, fork and spoon that move on the wall above the tray return. Lighted arrows that zig zag across the wall direct students to the area and add a bit of fun. Similarly, backlit pizza wedges are strung above Crossroads’ pasta station for a low-cost bit of impact.
The downstairs renovation was achieved primarily with signage and lighting, “which doesn’t cost a lot of money. We put lights on columns, which added style but isn’t expensive,” he says.
Puccini’s final change was to create a stairway connecting The Market and Crossroads below it, making it more a single operation.
“If the lines are too long in the dining room upstairs, students can say, ‘Let’s just go downstairs and get a sandwich,’” says Costello. “That’s important because we wanted the result to give students more menu, dining room and décor options. Universities have a captive audience, but students do get bored.”
Silver Dreams
Bob Puccini says the dining spaces his firm, Puccini Restaurant
Group, designed for the University of San Francisco may not
be his last foray into the noncommercial world. “We’d
be open to that,” he says. “If an opportunity came
up, we’d be interested.”
His firm’s latest project, however, is at the other, higher
end of the budget scale: SilverLeaf Tavern adjacent to Kimpton
Hotels and Restaurants’ first New York City property, 70
Park Avenue Hotel, on which it has spent $19 million in renovations.
As with the USF project, he says, the defining design elements for the 84-seat SilverLeaf dining room are its uses of lighting, color and texture to set a tone of relaxed style. The materials are a bit more upscale however, such as leather tabletops, black lacquered ceiling beams and a chandelier of branches covered with silver leaf.
“At USF we used bold lighting and colors appropriate to young people. For SilverLeaf, we also wanted a place where people come to relax, but it’s a little softer, dreamy and more sensual. The color palette is amethyst, plum, black and grays.”
For an interior designer, the challenge is to translate what he sees in his mind to the finished product, Puccini says. With both USF and SilverLeaf, he believes vision and reality have come together nicely.
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