My favorite part of Yale is the residential colleges (especially Davenport! Go gnomes!), and my favorite part of residential colleges is butteries! For those of you who don’t know, a buttery is a late night café in each residential college that serves all sorts of delicious food and snacks late at night after the dining halls have closed. My favorite buttery on campus is, of course, the Davenport buttery, also known as The Dive, which I also happen to work in during the school year! I just started working there this past school year, after one of my close friends, Kat, convinced me to work with her. She had already worked there for a year, and just watching her work there looked like so much fun! It also didn’t hurt that everyone who works in the Dive gets food for free! Last semester, we worked on Wednesday nights, and the two of us had a tradition of wearing backward snapbacks hats (mine is lime green, and hers has a dinosaur on it!) whenever we worked. Some of my best memories at Yale were made while working in the buttery with Kat, singing at the top of our lungs, and leaving at the end of the night smelling like bacon grease.
Based on a survey (that I conducted with a very small sample size and questionable statistical legitimacy), The Dive is the best buttery on campus, and we have the food to back it up. The Dive’s specialty is the RJR, which has been a Davenport staple for years. Legend has it that a student, whose initials were RJR, invented this delicacy, and the rest is history. The RJR is made with cheese, buffalo chicken, bacon, ranch, and hot sauce, all inside a crispy tortilla… I really should have eaten before writing this. Other favorite menu items include the Heartstopper (a cheeseburger with an egg and bacon) and the Goldilocks (a waffle with peanut butter and drizzled with honey)!
This summer, as a counselor for Yale Summer Session, I am working in Morse College’s buttery, also known as The Morsel. Here is one of our most popular menu items, the bacon barbeque quesadilla!
It’s made with cheese, chicken, bacon, and barbeque sauce.
As you can see, it’s a pretty filling dish (it’s spilling out of the tortilla!).
We also make more original creations. I once made a sundae with cookie dough ice cream, chocolate sauce, caramel sauce, and pretzels, and after all of this it was topped with even more cookie dough!
Outside of food that’s prepared by all our dedicated buttery workers, we also have lots of fast snacks and drinks to choose from.
In my year and a half of working in butteries at Yale, I have made so many great memories, and I’ve gotten to known so many new people in my college. People come to their butteries to grab a fast study snack, hang out with friends, and just have a good time. It’s just another way that residential colleges help bring us altogether, despite our busy class and extracurricular schedules!