Surviving the Dining Hall

This is an article I wrote about how students try to entertain themselves while eating at BU dining halls. It tells you how to enjoy some Warren Towers food.

Hundreds of droids darted out of the “Lambda Class Shuttle” toward a mob of Jedi. At the center of the chaos were Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in the galaxy far far away. This battle scene occurred not only in Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back, but also on the dessert plate at Boston University’s Warren Towers dining hall. Two students, Carolyn Cosgrove Payne and Tim Nicklas, discovered an innovative way to enjoy the same day-old salads, the same burnt burgers and the same stale brownies. Thanks to what Nicklas entitled “dessertstry,” Cosgrove Payne and Nicklas invented artworks with dessert items offered at the dining hall. The creations include a gourmet brownie sundae topped with strawberries and whipped cream, an erupting chocolate and banana volcano and the “Oil Tank Spill.”

A discussion in Oceanography last semester inspired Nicklas to create the “Oil Tank Spill.” As the class learned about the Exxon ship’s accident, he imagined recreating the incident with bananas with chocolate syrup oozing out.

“I consider myself an artist. I love the rich depth of colors. It is like a palette of dessert items,” Nicklas said.

Every day students walk into the dining hall to find “day old brownies with a lack of temperature variance and occasional staleness,” Cosgrove Payne said. She suggested the perfect remedy for the hardened brownies: “Douse the brownies in chocolate syrup and heat them up in the microwave for exactly 25 seconds. Then simply add vanilla ice cream, whipped cream and strawberries.”

Nicklas’s close friends recognize and honor him as the creator of “TGIF-style dessert” at the Warren Towers. Once he built a Batmobile with ice cream cones as the exterior, bananas as the interior, brownies as decorations and peanut butter as the adhesive material. He said, “I have always wanted to eat a Batmobile, but you can’t exactly eat metal.”

Cosgrove Payne and Nicklas proved the possibility of devouring high-quality desserts at a college dining hall. Cosgrove Payne said, “It’s a dessert monstrosity and a food orgasm.”

The next item in the “dessertstry?” Nicklas gave a hint. “I cannot tell you, but big things will happen! When you draw something, no one can see it until it is done. The ‘dessertstry’ is the same way.”