Home Artikelen Cheap dining with conviviality: this is the Meet and Eat

Cheap dining with conviviality: this is the Meet and Eat

Connecting to students outside your bubble offline and enjoying an affordable meal is still possible. The Meet and Eat is held every Wednesday evening at the Student Chaplaincy. ANS took a look at this weekly dining event organised by and for students.

It is six o’clock in the evening when the first guests arrive at the Student Chaplaincy for the Meet and Eat. In the kitchen straight across the entrance, a group of students is still busy preparing the meal for tonight. The dining hall next to the kitchen is immersed in the smells of spinach and cinnamon sugar. The dessert is poured into paper coffee cups, which are then put on trays and left to cool outside. In the meantime, two members of the organising committee talk about this culinary event.

Three-course meal for peanuts

The Meet and Eat has been quite a popular institution among mainly international students at the HAN University of Applied Sciences and Radboud University for twelve years now. ‘It is organised quite informally’, Xyqu Croes, a committee member. ‘We are just a couple of students who do this every week’, he continues. Their need for a public kitchen and a large enough dining hall on campus led them to the Student Chaplaincy. ‘The Meet and Eat has no connection to religion whatsoever, to keep the barrier of entrance low’, Croes stresses. The event describes itself as a meeting place for students of all backgrounds. ‘Participants are incentivised to get to know each other by their own initiative, while enjoying a meal’, Danique Dumfries, another member of the committee, explains.

The Student Chaplaincy provides the electricity and other facilities for the event, thus only groceries need to be paid for. That way, costs can be kept down for the meal: each guest is charged just four euros. Because of this, the Meet and Eat has gained its fair share of fans through social media. ‘It is full house pretty much every evening’, Dumfries says. ‘We can support no more than fifty visitors at a time, so we regularly have to turn people away’, she proceeds. Cooking and serving three-course meals every week is very intensive for student-volunteers, so each edition sees a different group of students preparing the meal. They can cook whatever they want, provided it fits within the budget. Additionally, deep-frying is forbidden to prevent issues with cleaning. Every night has a theme; tonight, it is Greek night.

Food for conversation

The evening is quickly filled with chatter, with little need found to use smartphones. Many students who come here are regulars, but it is not hard for first-timers to strike up a conversation and start new friendships. Indeed, most visitors are international students; the amount of Dutch visitors here can be counted on one hand. In order to foster an inclusive environment, everyone is expected to speak English to each other.

The room goes silent when Croes signals the beginning of the meal with his signature cry, which resembles a screeching bird. Every first-timer is inaugurated with a round of applause, whereafter Croes portrays a national stereotype with the visitors. After the introductions, the guests are served a delicious spinach pie, followed quickly after by the main course, a rather hard to eat pasta dish from the island of Corfu. Tonight’s cooks give a presentation on Greek customs and traditions, while treating the diners with no less than three desserts. They first hand out a sweet that is served in a glass of water. Then come a nicely sweet, but a bit too cool, rice pudding and an optional cup of Greek coffee.

At eleven in the night, this Meet and Eat sadly has to end, as there will still be lectures the next morning. The visitors say goodbye to the committee and to each other. Many satisfied diners write or draw something in the guest book before returning to their rooms.

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