Karen Lin, Photo Editor

When late-night cravings hit for Yale students, residential college butteries are the go-to, serving items ranging from chicken nuggets to bubble tea. Now, Yalies can explore each buttery’s offerings with a new student-created app.

Each of Yale’s 14 residential colleges houses its own buttery, a student-run late-night snack cafe with a unique name and several buttery-special creations. To gather all of these menus in one place, suitemates Braden Wong ’24, David Peng ’24, Bilal Moin ’24 and Sonny Nguyen ’24 created the app “The Buttery Book.”

“It was Halloween night,” Wong wrote to the News. “We had just conceived the idea at 12:53 a.m. I told the lads I could probably get a prototype done by the end of the night — but I had left my computer in a friend’s suite. Without second thought, Bilal raced in the pouring rain on his bike to get my computer. Together, we pulled a near all-nighter until we had a working user interface.”

The four Yalies spent more than a week visiting each buttery, sampling nearly all the menu items and compiling information to make sure the app was accurate. 

In addition to menu items and prices, the app features recommendations and operating hours.

“On one side, we hope students who want to use the buttery more have places to eat or study more,” the four creators wrote in a joint email to the News. “We want to promote experimentation and exploration on campus, especially for first-years and sophomores this year, who didn’t get the same opportunity to fully explore the campus. We hope it helps create some memories.”

The creators also noted how students tend to remain in their own residential colleges to get a nighttime snack or study. They hope that this app will motivate students to explore other residential college butteries.

After collecting feedback from friends, the app was officially released on Nov. 18, and the Yale undergraduate student body was notified by the creators via email. To date, 6,600 people have visited the Buttery Book website, and 401 have downloaded the app, the creators said.

“We’re really grateful for the turnout, it’s beyond anything we could’ve hoped for,” the creators wrote.

Peng said that one of the “coolest” parts of making and releasing the app has been overhearing people casually use or mention it. 

The creators added that they have been receiving feedback from students and buttery managers, who suggested improvements, and have been emailed newly-made versions of the menus, which they have used to keep the app up to date.

Regarding future projects for the coding quartet, Moin said that they have a wall of ideas and problems on their common room wall and a new project currently in the works.

Students can download the app for Apple and Android or view it online.

YEJI KIM
Yeji Kim covers the AACC, La Casa and NACC. Originally from Ohio, she is a first-year in Berkeley College majoring in ethics, politics and economics and East Asian Studies.