School lunch consisting of pasta, orange slices, carrots, and bread
Ever wonder what the school lunches taste like? Or whether the restaurants near Roosevelt are worth the money? The new Roosevelt club, RHS Food Critics, strives to answer these questions.
Freshmen Sonja Howard, Alan Brennan, and Solomon Lucero, some of the club’s members, say they created the club for fun, with its mission being to critique school lunches and the restaurants around Roosevelt.
Howard says, “It just started with my friends. We thought it’d be fun to rate the school lunches.”
Brennan and Lucero say it started after they went to An Nam Pho near Roosevelt Square and gave some comical reviews. From that, Brennan says Lucero “decided to make an Instagram account and then we just kind of did that.”
The club’s Instagram can be found @rhsfoodreview, where there are currently ten posts. Each post rates food on a scale of ten, and often includes commentary describing the quality, taste, and other merits. The comments are not to be taken harshly but as an opinion of what club members think.
Ratings also take price and portion size into consideration. Brennan says, “Price is really important to me, because you don’t want to spend too much and you just want to get a quick thing to eat around the school.”
The club aims to provide peers with an idea of what is “worth their money around Roosevelt, cause a lot of [restaurants] can be pretty expensive,” explains Howard.
Howard’s inspiration comes from people who are really passionate about food: “Chefs who know what they’re doing and they have really good tastes of different foods. They know what they are doing and that can be inspiring to show that I could try all these different foods too sometime.”
Howard continues by saying, “I like to try different foods from time to time. Switch things up. In school lunch, I don’t just take the same thing everyday.”
The group takes measures to improve their palettes in different ways. Brennan and Lucero try various foods around Roosevelt Square, such as different poke and sushi venues. Howard explains that the culinary class she took improved her skills and expanded her taste when she baked macaroons.
The club incorporates the feedback of their peers to base ratings on a variety of opinions and reviews, fostering healthy discussion.
When asked if they were worried about backlash, Howard says, “No, I think it’s all pretty light hearted so no one takes it too seriously.” Adding on, Brennan says, “I feel like the only backlash we possibly could get is like ‘flaming’ the school lunches.”
Instead, many students support their work. Some comment and request the review of specific foods. In the first month of creating the account, Brennan says, “We’ve gotten a lot of DMs from other accounts asking for us to do reviews on certain dishes in the cafeteria.”
Compared to lunches in years past, Howard says, “I think the unpaid ones taste better, actually. They have a lot more variety of different lunches because each day there’s a whole selection you can choose from.”
There are several different options students can pick from the school cafeteria: salad, hot plate, sandwiches, and fruit on the side. Lucero says that the meals are sufficiently filling.
Howard disagrees, saying, “I actually don’t think the school lunches are enough to fuel you for the rest of the day, especially if you do a sport. I would think that the schools would have a requirement of enough calories to keep students going.
To any last words for students to keep in mind for the school lunches, Howard suggests, “Don’t eat the carrots! They taste like hand sanitizer.”
The future of this club seems up in the air as the underclassmen Brennan and Lucero plan to post every now then, but shy away from big commitments.
However, Howard says the experience has been “a lot of commitment. I wouldn’t have a consistent schedule and since it’s a group thing, we all just do it whenever we feel like it. Like a hobby.”
Here are the foods they highly suggested and worth your buck: BLT and Mango Lassi from Rain City Burger and the salads from the school cafeteria!
