Dear AU Community,   

We are excited to welcome everyone back for the fall 2024 semester. Over the past several months, our teams have been focused on completing our campus dining transformation by fully renovating the Terrace Dining Room (TDR) for the first time in nearly 40 years. The new TDR, decorated in vibrant AU colors, will deliver a significantly improved experience for our entire AU community, including community members with specialized dietary needs.  

The new TDR brings cooking out from behind the scenes to action stations, allowing our community to interact more directly with our culinary team during their dining experience. The new TDR is designed to align more closely with a food hall-style of cuisine delivery and makes better use of technology. Community members can expect a variety of seating options, including booths, high-top tables, and family-style tables, as well as new automated turnstiles that will make entering TDR easier. We will also launch a new TDR to-go program, supported by our partnership with Grubhub, in which community members can order their favorite TDR menu items to go for pickup in food lockers at the TDR entrance. Most significantly, our new dining hall now features specialty-designed preparation and cooking areas for our kosher-observant and allergen-sensitive community members in brand new, dedicated action stations. These new stations will enable us to deliver increased choices and better value for these community members.   

In addition to TDR, community members can expect improved services across our other dining venues. These changes include the full opening of our faculty and staff University Club (U-Club) venue, which will open for daily lunch service, Monday to Thursday in two daily seatings and include a meal option for our kosher-observant faculty and staff members. At our retail venues, including Panera and Starbucks, we will have more limited-time promotional offerings based on the success of similar offerings last year. In our campus markets, we are adding additional grab-and-go items at the East Campus Market, more kosher offerings at our Eagle’s Express Market, and adding more fresh food vending options across campus.  

Thanks to our new enhanced kosher offerings, we are excited to announce the transition from the District Pickle venue to our improved TDR, Campus Markets, TDR to-go, and U-Club kosher options. Over the past three years, we’ve gathered valuable feedback from our kosher-observant community members, and this change reflects our commitment to providing them with better-quality meals at a more accessible value. District Pickle opened in 2019 as our campus’ first kosher dining option providing freshly made deli items at a time when our dining program offered only prepackaged kosher meals. Over the years, District Pickle mainly served freshman and sophomore meal plan holders using a meal exchange, which is a more expensive meal plan component. Our new offerings combine the District Pickle menu, available via TDR to-go, with more kosher options throughout the day in TDR to provide more choices and better value to our community members. 

The exciting changes we have made will improve our campus dining experience greatly for our entire AU community. As the year progresses, we will continue to share information regularly with the AU community about our efforts to deliver an exceptional dining experience. As always, we invite the AU community to contact us at mealplans@american.edu with questions or comments, and you can find more information online at https://dineoncampus.com/au.   

Onward we go, together!    

Bronté Burleigh-Jones
CFO, Vice President, and Treasurer   

Michael Scher
Assistant Vice President, Campus Auxiliary Services and Airlie   

Ann Marie Powell
Sr. Director, Dining and Auxiliary Services