Meal Service Opens Hotline

Do crispitos make you break out in hives? Does the sight of fish, Harvard style, send you running to Cafe Avventura?

Now you can find out whether to hit the Square or the dining hall for dinner by just picking up the phone.

Harvard Food Service officials have established a new "Dial-A-Menu" service, prompted by dozens of calls per day about the menu in the undergraduate dining halls. Beginning this fall, undergraduates can find out the daily menu in the dining halls by calling 495-5700.

Organized by John Shaffer at the Freshman Union, the recording will be changed daily. Callers will learn everything on the menu for all three meals including main courses, desserts and even the vegetables.

But because the message is only 30 seconds long, sometimes the information will be incomplete, according to John E. O'Neil, manager of the Freshman Union. After all, broccoli and cheese pasta has a lot of syllables.

The menu service will save the managers of the individual house dining halls some work. "When you're trying to run a [meal], it gets a little irritating to get 30 or 40 calls a night about the menu," O'Neil said.