Food Diary: USC, Season 1

It’s … been a while! I greatly enjoyed my first, wonderful (albeit busy) semester at USC, but now it’s finally time for an update. Namely, one involving food.

Buckle up, y’all, since this post isn’t going to be for the faint of heart. It’s going to be long.

I hope that for those trying to get a taste (hahahaha no pun intended) of USC Dining — particularly prospective students — this post is useful and fun!

I’ll preface this edition of “Food Diary” by saying that these are certainly highlights of the better meals I’ve had on campus. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last four months, it’s that USC Dining cannot be trusted with consistency.

The Deal With the Meal Plan

Last year, due to COVID, students on the Cardinal Meal Plan — default for freshmen — got 19 swipes a week to use anywhere, be it dining halls, campus center, or the cafes around campus. However, in an effort to allegedly foster community (or something like that), the university changed the system back to unlimited swipes at the three dining halls across campus, with two swipes a week to be used at certain vendors at the campus center.

As you’ll discover in this post, I’m not a super big fan of the dining halls, but I find it convenient that I can walk into the dining hall whenever with friends and not have to do the math for whether I’ve overused the swipes for the week. I thought the community thing was a big excuse at first, but I’ve met some of my closest friends in the dining hall, so I think that it works.

On weekdays, three meals are served: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. On weekends, only two are: brunch and dinner. Some people really like this system, but I find that I never eat enough at brunch to keep me satiated until dinner, so I just go to brunch twice, usually at different dining halls.

Sometimes we just need to sacrifice the quality of food we eat for the sake of other things, such as the College Experience™.

Dining Hall Thoughts

McCarthy Honors Dining Hall

I live right above this dining hall. I like to say that the one you live closest to is the one that you’ll hate the most — anecdotally, this seems pretty true. (Minus the visible exception of a certain pack of Parkside kids.) It’s pretty true for me specifically — I’ll rarely go to McCarthy intentionally. I go for breakfast because I don’t feel like making the trek, and I’ll go for dinner if I’m in my room by then. Otherwise, I tend to go elsewhere.

McCarthy has two draws that are very marketable at first sight: the dining hall’s design — which is based off the Great Hall at Hogwarts — and the crepe bar.

Yes, we have a crepe bar.

Unlike the other two dining halls on campus, McCarthy doesn’t have a real “custom” line beyond the breakfast omelette bar and the crepe bar (when it’s open). Everything is self-serve. This makes the lines somewhat shorter, but on good days (like Mac-n-Cheese), the line will stretch around half the dining hall.

McCarthy’s worst meal is definitely breakfast. Instead of two food lines, there’s only one. It’s also really predictable: there’s bacon, sausage, some kind of potato, powdered scrambled eggs, and some kind of strange dish of the day. Many of these strange dishes manifest in the form of “pancake bakes,” which end up greatly varying in quality.

The blueberry muffins are to die for, though. Next to the blueberry muffins is a bunch of yogurt and fruit (on the weekdays). While I don’t trust the yogurt, it’s great to be able to get unlimited raspberries for breakfast.

Brunch days gives me a lot more variety, especially with more savory food. Why wait for lunch and dinner to get started on the veggies when you can do it as soon as you wake up?

McCarthy is probably the worst offender when it comes to lukewarm food. My worst experience with this was probably the ramen. How can ramen be room temperature? It was a very strange experience.

It tasted fine, although the texture of the noodles was off-putting. They were incredibly soft and thick — absolutely not what they’re supposed to be like.

One of my good friends got food poisoning from dining hall food, and he suspects that the ramen was the cause. Eat at your own risk!

A lot of people say not to trust the dining hall fish, but I think that McCarthy does a better job with it than I’d expect for it to. I also prefer how it tastes over their beef. Whatever their sauce is, it’s pretty good and I haven’t had one that’s really bad yet!

None of this is bad on sight, but sometimes the taste is off. I’ve had sour vegetables more times than I can count on one hand, to the horror of my parents. Nothing bad has happened yet, but it’s just weird. Butter cabbage, green beans, and boy choy have all been prone to this issue. I go in expecting salty vegetables and come out eating something that tastes like it was fermented. Not a great look, to be honest.

On the aforementioned Mac-n-Cheese days, they also always have the chia seed pudding. I hadn’t really had it before, but I think I have become a convert. It’s perfectly sweet, and the berries are the really fresh ones that come directly from a Driscoll’s container. I saw them pouring it out twice.

I swear it looks different every time they make it, but it always tastes the same, so I have no complaints.

I’m a super big fan of USC’s sweet potato fries. I think Parkside does them best, but they’re still great at McCarthy. They’re perfectly salted, surprisingly hot, and they have an amazing ratio between the crunch and the soft sweet potato.

Note: try McCarthy soup with caution. It is often horribly salty. At least it’s usually hot, though. They also do have good soups from time to time; I had a creamy chicken and mushroom soup once that I literally had two bowls of.

I give a serious shot at hitting all of my food groups, and I think that it’s pretty easy to achieve at McCarthy. Sometimes it involves eating things I probably wouldn’t eat at home, but that’s led me to some interesting new foods. I think I’ve hit the same amount of meat consuption (or even more) in the four months I was at USC compared to the last year.

Another thing I’ve come to notice is that a lot of dining hall food is very colorful. It’s not like this at every school, to my understanding, so I am quite appreciative at USC’s attempt to maintain some semblance of health.

I haven’t had any horrible experiences with McCarthy — I just find that the food gets really repetitive really quickly, and that’s not ideal when a lot of the repetition is the meat.

Everybody’s Kitchen (EVK)

EVK gets a lot of hate and I don’t really see why. I agree that it’s small, but all of the food is hot. This cannot be said of the other dining halls on campus. It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized how much I value hot food. During K-12, I ate meals in Thermos containers, which certainly wasn’t hot, but I wasn’t expecting it to be. There are few experiences stranger than seeing food you expect to be hot, only to find out it is lukewarm.

A lot of people complain about how the food is bad, but then fail to back up their reasons for exactly why. I’ve gotten offered raw mushrooms and raw onions before, but that’s also happened one at McCarthy.

I totally understand that EVK can be pretty hit-or-miss, but when they get it right, it’s super good. Sometimes they have odd combinations of food in the same dish, but if you get past that and you’re willing to give it a try, it’s often surprisingly good.

The Hawaiian bowl is a good example: who would think that macaroni salad and teriyaki chicken would taste good together? This is one of my favorite things to eat in the dining hall, though. It’s crunchy with tender chicken, both salty and sweet, and hot yet refreshingly cool. It also just looks really good!

EVK also gets its soy sauce right. I don’t think I quite understood how often had soy sauce when I was at home. It’s everywhere — to the point where at school I always felt like something was missing from my diet. I realized about halfway through the semester that USC doesn’t really have any MSG in the dining hall food. It was a struggle trying to curb the addiction to MSG!

I’m not a fan of dining hall rice, but it’s edible in fried rice. After eating at least once a day at McCarthy, I definitely need a reset to my taste buds.

People that know me well know that I usually eat a lot of Asian food. Despite USC’s massive Asian population, the Asian food scene on campus is more than lacking. However, EVK gives it a real shot, and it turns out pretty good sometimes! I love the tonkatsu bowl (they have tempura shrimp instead, too!), although I am not a fan when they serve this cold.

The hot line has some super popular options that I didn’t capture, such as the poke bowl. I don’t trust raw fish in the dining halls, but I’ve heard great things about it.

Pro tip: if you want the hot line, show up at 11 am right when it opens on weekdays and 2 pm on weekends. No one else will fight you. You think that would be true for dinner, but after 11:30 am it seems like the dining halls are just a never ending stream of people.

Even outside of the hot line, often there are good options. EVK is the only dining hall that consistently has pizza (sometimes Parkside does, but not always). It’s not too shabby, and it’s pretty nice to be able to grab pizza whenever you’re really missing it.

My favorite buffet line food at EVK is hands down the shrimp scampi with pasta, though. I had the best shrimp scampi of my life in O’ahu at Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck, and while this definitely doesn’t compare (and the dining hall version sports very few actual shrimp), it has the same aroma.

In the dining hall, they generally serve a lot of the same foods together. For example, they always serve the scampi with white truffle macaroni. Sometimes they’ll also have the arugula salad — I can’t tell what they put on it, but it’s so good. I always go when they serve it!

EVK is also home to the fun fruits and desserts. Where else would you be able to grab a plum and a whoopie pie together? (I had no idea what it was called, so I used Google Lens to help me search. Oops…)

EVK is also home to one of the soft serve machines. Sometimes, if you’re having a rough time during classes, you can just swipe in and grab some soft serve to help you brighten up your day! I’ve heard of fellow students mixing the soft serve with things ranging from soda to cereal. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

Parkside

Hot take: Parkside is overrated. I feel like it’s generally very bland.

Parkside is also the queen of inconsistency. One day, they’ll have the best brussel sprouts you’ve ever had in your life. The next week, they’ll have the exact same brussel sprouts, but they taste like dirt.

It’s not that the food is bad overall, but rather that it’s very repetitive. Take a look at the number of times fish, mushrooms, and brussel sprouts make an appearance in the images I have of my food!

I do have to say that I appreciate USC’s emphasis on vegetables. I ate so many vegetables with such variety when I was at home. Even though I think it’d be really nice if USC had more leafy vegetables, I know that things could be a lot worse.

I miss my shrimp, though. Shrimp doesn’t appear very often in the dining halls, which makes sense because of cost, but I still miss it regardless.

At home, I also mostly ate pescatarian, which definitely was a bit of a struggle at USC. It’s pretty noticeable that still err on the side of pescatarian. A whole hunk of roasted chicken is not particularly appealing to me. I also only eat beef in really specific instances — mostly just a texture issue.

The absurd amount of pork in the dining halls, though: that is ridiculous. I don’t eat American pork because it tastes strange to me (particularly in comparison to Taiwanese pork), but I have a lot of friends around me who can’t eat pork for religious reasons. When pork is one of the only protein options on the menu, this limits what all of us can have.

A lot of people argue that the highlight of Parkside is the Bistro line — Parkside’s version of the hot line. Unless you go at 11am, though, it’s honestly not worth the wait. I think it has good days and bad days, and you never know what you’re up against.

For example, I wasn’t really a fan of the spring roll bowl — it’s just a bunch of cold items thrown together with a (also cold) mystery sauce. Where is the roll, anyway?

However, I was a really big fan of their tacos. I had never had tacos until I moved to LA, but I guess I’ve had a taste of the good stuff in one of the best places to have it.

Since the quarter of campus that engineering takes up is right next to Parkside, I find myself eating there a lot. Could be worse, I guess.

Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC)

Conveniently, there are a bunch of food options in the middle of campus: Tutor Campus Center, affectionately known by students as “TCC.” Among the most popular are the açaí bowl from C&G Juice and the salmon bowl from Seeds Marketplace.

You can order at the kiosks within the campus center, but you can also order ahead via app. This is super convenient, especially if you’re in a rush.

For açaí bowls, there’s an option to pick your own toppings (instead of the prearranged choices), so I usually go for that one. You get up to three toppings, and I use it to load up on a dose of much-needed fruit. However, despite LA’s reputation for always being warm and sunny, I would definitely caution against eating this under a tree in November. You’ll get pretty cold.

Luckily, the salmon bowl doesn’t have this problem. Its popularity is insane, though, so make sure you order ahead on the app in advance! Wait times can go through the roof, especially during peak lunch rush between 12 and 1 pm.

The system is somewhat flawed in that it doesn’t really matter whether you order the salmon bowl or the chicken bowl, since they’re made at the same place and thus both take forever to get ready.

Elsewhere

There are a bunch of campus cafes, but since I don’t have any dining dollars, I can’t go to them unless I want to pay in real money. As a college student, I don’t have that kind of money lying around, so that’ll be something I get to try during Season 3 when I get onto the Apartment Meal Plan.

Concluding Thoughts

UCLA students like to brag about their food as a way to say they’re better than us, and while their food might sound better, we all know who is superior! USC’s food isn’t perfect, but it’s already better than what I expected, and certainly better than what I hear about the dining halls from friends back home.