Nowhere To Eat

Why does it feel like the colder it gets at Harvard, the more House dining halls close their giant wooden doors on poor hungry non-residents? Winthrop has just joined the ranks of Adams, Eliot, Kirkland, Leverett, Lowell, and Quincy by instituting dining hall restrictions. Life for quadlings and other wanderers has just gotten a little bit worse.

According to an e-mail sent yesterday by Winthrop House Administrator Joanna G. Miller, Winthropians have recently found themselves squeezed out of their own dining halls by outsiders scrambling for table space. The Masters and House Committee concluded that some inter-house dining restrictions were in order. They are not terribly different from the types of changes Lowell recently implemented:

One guest per Winthropian for the entire lunch period, every day

One guest per Winthropian for Sunday brunch

One guest per Winthropian for dinner 7 nights a week, until 7:00pm, and then it's open to everyone

Winthrop residents said they had definitely noticed the crunch at dinnertime.

“In general, I don’t really like dining hall restrictions, but there’s definitely been way too many people sitting in our dining hall,” Winthrop resident Christopher R. Behrer ’11 said. “My friend and I had to walk around for 15 minutes yesterday to find a seat.”

But how, you ask, will the dining hall staff know you’re not a Winthrop imposter? It’s ingenious, really. The House tutors will implant a computer chip in each student that will be scanned by laser beams when you enter the dining hall...oh wait, that plan was scrapped.  They’re giving students stickers to put on their IDs.

Don’t know where you can eat anymore? One rule of thumb is that the farther the House from the Yard, the better your odds of finding a place to eat. Dunster, Mather, and the Quad Houses will still welcome you with open arms no matter which House you call your own. For the rest of the rules, check here.

So what are the options for a starving freshman returning from crew practice or a Cabot resident who finds himself down by the river?  Well, you can go to Winthrop for dinner after 7 p.m., befriend someone in a river house and become their “plus one” a few nights a week, or try to swipe a sticker for your ID. Otherwise there is always Felipe's. Good luck!