In the spring of 2006, St. Bonaventure University (SBU) hired our foodservice design team to assist Cannon Design of Buffalo, NY with the renovation and design of Hickey Dining Hall, The University's residential dining venue and the creation of the new Hickey Cyber Café adjacent to the residential dining venue.

Hickey Dining Hall was dated and uninviting. In addition to ambiance challenges, the design of the servery did not allow the Dining Services staff to easily restock food stations and created congestion in the front of the house. The food stations themselves were mostly stainless steel and fairly unattractive. The dining room featured large, round tables that were not efficient or customer friendly. The primary focus of the renovation was to improve flow and throughput in the serving area and to create a comfortable and welcoming dining venue that would meet today’s students’ expectations. Due to budget constraints, most of the kitchen space including the bakery, a portion of the dishroom and part of the servery support space remained intact.

The total project budget was $2 million including professional fees for the dining hall and $1 million plus professional fees for the cyber café.

The new and improved residential dining venue is a state-of-the-art jewel. The servery now includes a wide variety of individual offerings including a pizza station with a wood-burning brick oven, a Mongolian grill, a supersized salad bar, plus deli, hot entrée, specialty foods (display cooking) and dessert stations. The dining room features all new furniture including large and small tables and booths, new floor and wall coverings and new lighting. As a result of Porter’s equipment survey, we identified several pieces of existing equipment that could be reused in the redesign. The cyber café is currently under construction and will share production kitchen and support space with the residential dining facility.

Services that Porter provided to the project team included: preliminary design schematics and spatial calculations, design development including a to-scale floor plans of each area including foodservice equipment, a mechanical, plumbing, and electrical utility load chart, elevations of custom fabricated equipment, written specifications for all foodservice equipment, and construction administration services including an on-site inspection of the project during the installation of the foodservice equipment and a completed final punch list of discrepancies as they relate to compliance with bid documents by the foodservice equipment contractor, and recommendations for corrective action.