New food and coffee options open up on USU campus
Beth’s Bistro, named after the current dean of education Beth Foley, opened to the public Thursday. The soft open will continue until the beginning of the 2018 fall semester when the grand opening will take place.
The new restaurant is located in the Sorenson Center for Clinical Excellence, a new building on campus that opened March 3. The CCE can be found just north of Edith Bowen Laboratory School.
Beth’s Bistro is “the best cafe we have, hands down,” said Alan Andersen, the executive director of Dining Services. “It’s a neat hang out space. In central campus, they’ll use it a lot.”
The bistro will be open all year and the space will have multiple uses and a versatile kitchen. The possibilities for menu options are open.
“This, as far as any location, will have a very movable menu,” said Dining Services operations manager Anthony Linton. “We’ll learn from our guests, and that’s something we’ll try to be very proactive about, especially toward the front end.”
Holley Stringham Beth’s Bistro, the new restaurant in the Sorenson Center for Clinical Excellence, opened March 15.
There are vegetarian menu options as well.
“We do a lot of substitutions,” Andersen said. “The portobello Philly is vegetarian. That’s our vegetarian. Look at the omelet — they can put veggies on it.”
Andersen said vegetarians are a very vocal minority and meeting the rising demand for vegetarian options is a challenge for him in Utah.
According to a 2018 report by Baum + Whiteman, an international restaurant-owning and consulting firm based in New York City, meatless and plant-based diet trends were placed at number one and are predicted to go mainstream.
The report said 31 percent of Americans already practice meat-free days, and Google saw a 90 percent increase in vegan searches last year.
Even though vegetarians and vegans make up 6 and 3 percent, respectively, of the current U.S. population, the Baum + Whiteman report cited that between 2012 and 2016 there has been a 25 percent increase in vegetarian claims and a 257 percent rise in vegan claims in new products in grocery stores. This trend is expected to have a ten point increase “for the reasonable future,” the report read.
Andersen is a little more cautious and skeptical of this trend’s popularity in Utah.
“One of the challenges in Utah is that, you see, with national changes, it is a little different here,” he said. “These reports are driven by population, so places like San Francisco and New York will be ahead of the trends by four to five years, and it takes that amount of time for it to reach Utah. Our job is not to drive choices.”
Linton said the restaurant will run specials that will be weighed against the core menu items in terms of sales and will replace menu items if its sales are adequate.
Beyond the menu, Beth’s Bistro will feature Star Mountain Roasters coffee rather than university dining locations’ usual Cafe Ibis.
Andersen said one other Dining Services location, to be decided, will switch over to Star Mountain Roasters during the summer as well.
Dining Services will be opening another location on campus in the near future. Associate director of retail operations Jaime Bradford said Teas and Cheese will be part of the new Life Sciences building, scheduled to open by January of 2019. She also mentioned a yet-to-be-named coffee shop with pastries, designed for patrons of the art museum.
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