I find it really funny that a campus dining hall is on yelp.
Pros:
* Food: In terms of dining halls, this is the best food I've had and is perhaps the best dining hall on campus. They offer a lot of vegetarian options and the meat dishes are often pretty tasty. These two things cannot be said for most other dining halls. Salad bar is nice.
* Persistence: You can show up and stay for hours, do your homework, get soda / coffee refills, snack on stuff when you're hungry again. I think you could theoretically show up for breakfast and leave at 2am when they close.
* Healthy: It's POSSIBLE to eat fairly health here. I believe they buy organic and local when possible. You can also choose to avoid things that you view as unhealthy since it's a buffet.
Cons:
* Food: It's not ALWAYS good. It's true that there are many vegetarian options, but other than the salad bar they are mostly carb-heavy. It would be nice to see more creative vegetarian options that relied more on vegetables and legumes than pastas / potatoes / grains.
* Healthy: This place is touted as being healthy, but that's only half true. They give you plenty of options to not be healthy; I've seen people load up their plate full of pizza with a heap of bacon on top, drinking chocolate milk on the side. You will only eat healthy here if you CHOOSE healthy options and eat them in moderation.
* Price: They recently raised the prices of meals (for graduate students, at least) by a dollar per meal OR MORE (up to $3 per meal increase!!!). If you want to buy a dinner and don't know what you're doing on their website, you will pay over $10 per meal. This is a Stanford dining problem in general, but it's worth including in a discussion of Arrillaga Commons.
* Hours: While it's true that you can be here all day, you'll only get good food in small blocks of time. Dinner is from 5-8pm and if you stay or enter beyond that, you will be picking through whatever paltry leftovers there are from earlier. Maybe they bring out more food later, but my first hand experience is that 8:30pm seriously suuuuuuucks and isn't worth paying money for. Go someplace else.
Overall:
It's not a bad place, but a lot of us are bitter about the price increase. I would have given 4-stars if not for that. It's nice that you can choose what you want eat, instead of getting a burrito with way too much rice in it (I'm looking at you, Treehouse) or an obviously-frozen-before-it-hit-the-grill hamburger with bad-for-you fries (I'm looking at you, Axe), or a ridiculous amount of oily noodles with a bunch of other kinda-chinese food slathered in corn-syrup-based sauces (damn you, Panda).
There are a few things about this place that suck, but it is probably your best option for food on campus if you can afford the new prices. read more