As a student here, Chandler has been my go to place whenever I need some food. Generally, the food is pretty good, and the staff is very open to new ideas and caring of it's patrons. There are a few "off days" where the food seems to be gray (actually) and bland and under/overcooked, but as a person who makes plenty of mistakes on a daily basis with regard to my job of being a student, I can endure these days. I also have a lot of respect for my fellow students who spend valuable time to work with the CDS workers to make our dining experience better, however there is a caveat to this. As expected in a school of this calibre, Caltech fosters some of the most creative and enterprising kids in the nation, but when it comes to food sometimes they can be a bit too creative. Not only that, but their ambition is often overnighted by a relative hurried approach. For example, before releasing a new item on the menu, one should be 100% certain that the item "works" as expected. The new boba, while I appreciate the effort put in to trying to improve, is quite soft & sticky, so when I drink my tea, my ratio of boba to tea intake goes way down from what it nornally is, and by the time I am done I have roughly 60-70% of the boba I started with sitting at the bottom of the empty cup. This should be something that should have been caught before the product was released to the public, as there are glaring (yet relatively easy to fix) flaws in the food here. As an already stressed out student, seeing boba sitting in the bottom of my empty cup does nothing to alleviate this stress, which is ultimately a fundamental problem with Chandler. While I can deal with this, I am sure there are many picky eaters here who have had to go to great lengths to acquire more palatable food, doing things as extreme as dropping out of school in the middle of the term. To conclude my rather abrasive rant, it seems to me that Chandler should adhere to more of a "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" strategy as there are many good things that Chandler gives me that I would hate to see go. In addition, the students working closely with the staff to improve the culinary quality should use their brilliancy not only to bring new ideas our plates, but also to improve the existing, flawed facets of Chandler Cafe. Exercising caution when implementing ideas in the real world would serve these students a valuable life lesson beautifully summed up by the old saying, "If you want to inject charcoal into boba, don't be a moron about it". read more