For various reasons, throughout my two years here at OU, I've never gone to Jefferson dining hall very often. In fact, I can count the number of times I've been there on one hand. I never gave it much thought until I ate there last week.
Quite simply, I realized, Jeff hall is the hands-down, clear-cut best dining hall on campus and the runaway winner of Best Dining Hall at OU (an award I had no plans of giving out until I went to Jeff last week).
Located on East Green at the bottom of Jeff hill, this dining hall is the best for several reasons.
First off, it has a Wok bar that serves stir-fry at dinner Monday through Friday, and at lunch on Wednesdays. I can't underestimate how important this is. No other dining hall has anything like this. To OU's credit, the dining halls sometimes will serve "General Tso" chicken, with sauce tasting something like maple syrup. But all in all the dining halls are fairly lacking in Asian cuisine.
Also, the dining halls sometimes serve some pretty disappointing entrees, and it's nice to have a good-tasting meal to fall back on. And wh
ile some students might not expect much from dining hall-made stir-fry, it's actually pretty good. I wouldn't call it restaurant quality, but it's pretty darn tasty compared to most other options at the DH.
Part of this is because of all the options at the Wok bar. Stir-friers have an assortment of vegetables, a choice of noodles or rice, an option to include chicken or shrimp and several sauces at their disposal. The vegetable bar for the stir-fry is shown above and the line where it's made is shown below. My stir-fry, in which I got noodles, chicken, broccoli, pea pods and mushrooms mixed with sezchewan sauce, is below.
Aside from the stir-fry, there are other aspects of Jeff hall that set it apart from the rest. On your left as you walk in the dining hall is a smoothie bar. Smoothies! This is another feature of Jeff that isn't in any other DH. Because this is the dining hall we're talking about, the smoothies of course are not as good as store-bought ones. But they are surprisingly tasty. There are about five or six juices to choose from, and you can mix the juices as well (Last week I got wild berry and mango in mine). When the smoothie comes out, it has the icy consistency of a slushy.
Perhaps the best thing about Jeff hall is its
hours. Sunday through Thursday it is open for dinner from 4:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Not only are these the longest dinner hours of any dining hall at OU, they are the latest. This is very convenient because no other dining hall at OU is open past 7 p.m. Sometimes an undergrad will want to go the dining hall at night, but forget. In this kind of situation, it's Jeff hall to the rescue. On Friday dinner ends at 7 p.m., and for some reason Jeff is closed on Saturdays.
Anthony Riel, a sophomore and Bromley resident, said he eats at Jeff hall frequently when he visits his girlfriend who lives on South Green. He said he has had plenty of experience eating at Bromley and Jeff halls, and provided me with some insight on the differences between the two.
"(Jeff has) chicken wings and chicken nuggets more often than (Bromley)," Riel said. "(Jeff's) deli is better because the ham and bagels are more fresh (than Bromley's).
"They have delicious smoothies," he added.
Riel pointed out that Jeff hall does not always have a burger bar, a permanent feature at Bromley hall. He also told me that on weekends during the NFL season, Jeff hall projects football games on the wall.
My roommate Zach Schwab said Jeff provides a wider variety of sauces than any other dining hall. He calls Jeff "the king of condiments."
"Jeff has a bunch of condiments that I would never expect a dining hall to have," he said, citing buffalo ranch sauce as an example. "I've never even seen buffalo ranch in a grocery store."
