Starting Monday, students will have a new late-night dining option at the Joseph Slifka Center, which will offer dinner from 5 p.m. until 9 p.m on Monday through Thursday nights.
The new dining hours will be available for the first two weeks of the semester, and the pilot program will be extended if there is sufficient student demand, Yale College Council President Saloni Rao ’20 said. According to Rao, Slifka Center leadership and the YCC collaborated to offer the new dining option, as many students have long expressed interest in late-night dining. Over the years, administrators have floated the idea of extending dining hall hours in the residential colleges to encourage more students to live on campus, but the costs of later hours and potential resistance from Local 35 — the union that represents Yale’s dining hall workers — have stalled progress.
“Students across campus have expressed a strong demand for extended dinner hours in a campus dining hall that accepts Yale meal swipes and Eli Bucks,” Slifka Center Executive Director Uriel Cohen wrote in an email to the News. “We hope that providing extended dining will help students who have struggled to find dinner accommodations that work for their schedules.”
Weeknight dinners at Slifka will follow a special theme each night. There will be a made-to-order pasta station on Mondays, a burger bar on Tuesdays, chicken tenders and house-made falafel on Wednesdays and made-to-order stir fry on Thursdays.
Slifka will maintain its dining schedule on weekends, including Shabbat meals to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath, according to Cohen. As Slifka’s Kosher Kitchen has its own staff and operates independently from Yale Dining, Slifka has the resources and flexibility to offer late-night dining, according to Rao. Slifka, like the residential college dining halls, accepts meal swipes and Eli Bucks.
Leaders of Yale Hillel Student Board welcomed the announcement and said they hoped late-night dining draws more students to Slifka’s dining hall.
“Without knowing much of the logistics that have to go into it, I think it’s a good solution because it doesn’t put an extra burden on Yale Dining and at the same time will hopefully draw more students from diverse areas of the undergrad population to help expand Slifka’s community and make the building a more welcoming place,” said Sophie Lieberman ’21, a board member of Hillel.
Gabe Dolsten ’20, a co-president of Hillel, added that Slifka can serve the Yale community in ways that other dining halls cannot, and noted that Slifka already supplements the dining experience with popular events like bagel brunches and deli nights.
Slifka Center is located at 80 Wall Street.
Alice Park | alice.park@yale.edu