In Spring 2006, St. Bonaventure University (SBU) hired our design team to assist Cannon Design of Buffalo, New York with the renovation and design of Hickey Dining Hall, SBU’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 issues, the design of the servery did not allow the Dining Services staff to easily restock food stations which 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 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. Our firm also designed the adjacent cyber café that offers made-to-order hot beverages along with baked goods, gourmet sandwiches, bottled beverages and more. This venue shares 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.
