Now that I finished all my final exams, it’s time for an update to my old guide to MIT dining halls.
Overall, there’s been a great squishification towards the mean in terms of quality. The Next House dining hall is in terminal decline, Maseeh is… actually edible now? The other dining halls started out average and are still pretty average.
So about Next dining… for starters, the stir-fry, which I heaped so much praise onto in my previous review, is now the highlight of everything wrong with Next dining. It’s soggy, oversalted, looks like dead worms, and I’ve seen cockroaches a few times near the stir-fry station. Thankfully, the oyster crackers still exist so at least I have an option of last resort.
Next dining now has two kinds of soup for dinner every night. Most of the soups somehow even outshine Maseeh food in terms of vileness, but the chicken noodle soup is spectacular… for a Next dining soup, which means it’s pretty mediocre. Still, during a particularly disappointing night, I completed the “Six Soup Challenge” (sequel to the classic “Three Stir-Fry Challenge”) by somehow consuming six entire bowls of that soup.
And there’s mice. During broad daylight around tons of people! As far as I know the mice don’t have meal plans and didn’t tap their IDs on entry so they shouldn’t be allowed in the dining hall. What a massive failure of security. But they don’t care. I posted about this on an MIT forum and someone replied “Sorry but they seemed very polite so I tapped them in”. Ugh.
WORMGATE
So imagine this, OK? I’m just sitting there in Next dining, enjoying some “Parmesan Breaded Red Best Catch of the Day Fillet”, but in fact it was not the best catch of the day but rather the WORST catch of the day and contaminated with a toxic parasitic worm!!! I wrote a memey post about this on that forum and alerted the chefs, who told me it was a blood vein, not a worm. Hmmm, still seems suspicious.
A few days later, my friend found another worm in his fish as well! What are the odds? Anyways, he did the same thing and posted about it and alerted the chefs, who this time replied that it was just “the seed of an eggplant”. Hmmmmmm…
The next day, I received an email from the MIT Director of Campus Dining apologizing for the incident and awarding me $1000. Wow, they’re so considerate, compensating me for that blood vein!
A week later, the Director of Campus Dining was replaced.
I really don’t understand why MIT’s tuition is so high and they build all those fancy new buildings but don’t ever use that money to eradicate the cockroaches and mice and parasitic worms…
Maseeh 2.0
I’ve mocked the Maseeh dining hall a lot in the past, but honestly, it’s completely different nowadays. Their stir-fry is actually good, their pizza is no longer painted, and they have chicken noodle soup too sometimes. Maseeh oranges on the other hand…
I ate an orange at Maseeh. Seven hours later, it exited my mouth via projective motion in three batches. Yeah, food poisoning, also known as Maseeh orange syndrome, is not fun. I never ate an orange ever again. (Technically a slight lie.)