The first meal I ever had at Yale was a bowl of pasta.
Ragu alla Pugliese, specifically—served from the long stainless-steel line at Commons during Bulldog Days, when the ceilings felt impossibly high and the chandeliers too grand for a dining hall. I remember standing with a stranger who had just quoted Rawls at me and wondering if I’d ever feel like I belonged in a place like this. Then I took a bite of the pasta—sweet, savory, warm in that deeply unpretentious way—and thought, if nothing else, at least the food was good.
I’ve been eating that same bowl of pasta ever since. Through recipe changes and kitchen substitutions—when the saffron disappeared, when curry powder made a brief and confusing cameo, when the fresh-made pasta machine broke and we all solemnly accepted store-bought penne—I kept ordering it. Even when Commons stopped offering clementines for dessert. Even when they briefly served it with too much oil or not enough salt. I never left it behind. I couldn’t. Pasta e Basta, as they call the station, became something of a weekly covenant.
Now, every Wednesday, I meet my closest friends for a standing lunch in Commons. We sit under those chandeliers—still grand, still faintly ridiculous—and eat the same thing every week. Sometimes we talk about classes. Sometimes we just sit in companionable silence, slowly twirling noodles in tomato-slicked broth, letting the exhaustion of the week settle in around us like steam. Sometimes I take it to-go, sealed in a compostable box and eaten between classes or in the stacks of Sterling when deadlines close in. Sometimes, in spring, we carry our bowls to the Beinecke plaza and eat in the sun, our laughter echoing against marble facades, the pasta cooling in the breeze.
There’s no glamour to it. Just penne, pork, tomatoes, and a list of spices long enough to be a syllabus—thyme, nutmeg, fennel, bay leaf, black peppercorn, garlic powder, a whisper of crushed red pepper. It’s simple. Predictable. And maybe that’s the point.
At a place like Yale—where everything is always changing, where you’re always behind or rushing ahead, where it can feel like the whole campus is in motion—it’s rare to find something that holds still. But that pasta did. It became my anchor. My Wednesday liturgy. My small act of return.
More than that, it became a way of being in this place. It became Yale to me—not the institution, but the experience. Not the prestige, but the pattern. Because Yale isn’t just a university. It’s a hundred rituals stitched together until they form a kind of belonging. A dining hall meal. A mid-week meeting. A to-go box cradled in your hands like it holds more than just lunch.
And in some strange way, it does. The bowl of pasta is never just the bowl of pasta. It’s a map of memories: the first day you walked into Commons and didn’t get lost. The time your friend cried from laughing so hard at lunch. The quiet hours in Sterling, eating between sentences. The mid-April sun in Beinecke Plaza, where everything finally felt warm again.
This isn’t to say the pasta was always perfect. It wasn’t. Yale isn’t always perfect either. But I never abandoned that meal, in the same way I hoped Yale wouldn’t abandon me. Even when the sauce was thin, even when the pasta clung together or the spice ratios felt off, I trusted it. I stayed.
And maybe that’s the most honest thing I can say about this place: that it taught me what it means to stay. To root yourself in something—even something as seemingly small as a lunch routine—and let it carry meaning. The kind of meaning that isn’t flashy or profound, but builds slowly, quietly, until you look back and realize it’s what made everything else feel like home.
Because at Yale, even the small things can become transcendent. A study session in a tucked-away library. A sentence from a lecture you didn’t expect to remember. A bite of pasta, eaten at the same red table, week after week, until it becomes ritual.
That’s what this meal became for me. A symbol of constancy in a place that demanded change. A pause. A pulse. A reminder that belonging doesn’t always look like certainty—it sometimes looks like showing up, bowl in hand, and trusting that there will be something warm waiting for you.
And in that way, a Commons lunch became the most unexpected, most grounding tradition of my time at Yale. Not because it was extravagant. But because it was mine. Because it endured. Because it gave shape to my days and color to my memory. Because it reminded me, every Wednesday, that I was still here. Still learning. Still held.
Still hungry—for more than just pasta.
