College meals at Oxford and Cambridge certainly aren’t regarded as the pinnacle of gastronomic excellence. In fact, they have a pretty appalling reputation for being bland, sloppy, and depressing — enough to make Marco Pierre White shudder. This is a reputation that has persisted for generations and I, for one, think it is unjustified.
Oxford students tend to love their own colleges. I certainly do. But what students also tend to do is take any given opportunity to berate the food on offer at their college. If it were truly as ghastly as we claim, we would have presumably all starved by now, or taken up permanent residence outside Najar’s. Yet here we are, mysteriously sustained and some of us, doing alright.
Yes, we encounter puddings that are oppressively sweet. The occasional roast potato does emerge from the oven cremated, having had its molecular structure altered in such a way that it could now double as a doorstop in the Sheldonian. The odd portion of carrots whose boiling appears to have begun approximately halfway through the Pleistocene Epoch. But for every culinary mishap, there’s a whole team of staff that know your name, remember your preference of vegetable, and will slip you an extra Yorkshire pudding without being asked. Show me any restaurant that provides that level of personal service, and you certainly don’t get it at home, eating baked beans straight from the tin.
It also can’t be denied that college meals, generally speaking, are sensational value. Where else can you have a three course meal for the same price as a single pint of lager in the King’s Arms? In an age where the cost of a miserable sandwich from Pret is approximately 40% of your latest student loan instalment, college dining may be the last bastion of economic sanity.
The portions, too, deserve recognition. These aren’t the pretentious architectural arrangements you might encounter at some Michelin-starred establishment, where you leave the premises both £180 down and still famished — true story. College kitchens operate on the revolutionary principle that a meal should actually fill you up and as such, are portioned in such a way that they could sustain a Spartan battalion. I’ve been served slabs of shepherd’s pie that could legitimately qualify as geological features.
When we leave Oxford, I am very confident we’ll look back on college dining with great fondness. Not because the food was perfect, but because it was exactly what we needed it to be: reliable, affordable, and served by staff who genuinely cared about us. For me, that’s a legacy worth defending.