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Hillel House earning recognition as national leader in campus cuisine

By Hope Green

One recent Tuesday night, the dining room at Hillel House served up a new kosher delicacy: sushi.

Sushi? Clearly, this is not your bubbe's kosher kitchen.

"It took me 3 hours to make 14 maki rolls and they were gone in 20 minutes," says Valerie Lareau, Hillel House dining manager, of the seaweed-wrapped, ropelike loaves of rice, tuna, and cucumber that she had painstakingly assembled before sectioning them into the familiar bite-size morsels. "It was great. The kids were so psyched."

Rabbi Joseph Polak with students in the Hillel House kosher dining room. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Lareau made the Japanese dish on request, then shmoozed with the happy customers at their tables. Just as gladly she will prepare a student's mother's traditional chicken soup recipe, or put in an order for Granny Smith apples if a patron has a craving.

Such personal service, along with the food itself, contributed to the top marks Hillel House earned in a recent nationwide survey of college and university eateries.

The survey, conducted by Maritz Marketing Research, Inc., for Aramark Campus Services, polled students in 626 residential and retail dining areas, most of them nonkosher. Students were asked to rate the taste, appearance, freshness, and variety of the food, as well as availability of healthful menu items, friendliness of service, and the staff's ability to answer questions.

Hillel House not only ranked seventh overall, but also placed first among all contenders in the residential category.

The new laurel, says Rabbi Joseph Polak, a University chaplain and director of Boston University Hillel, "is a credit to BU and can be extremely important in attracting prospective students who keep kosher."

During the past few years, Hillel House has ranked so high in similar surveys that food managers from other universities have stopped by to learn why. It has come a long way since the 1960s, when Hadassah Freilich (CAS'70) -- now Hadassah Lieberman, wife of the senator and former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman -- cofounded a student-run kosher co-op in the Hillel basement.

When Polak came to BU in September 1970, he arranged for a caterer to deliver meals. Five years later, BU Dining Services refurbished the kitchen and hired a cooking staff. Lareau arrived in November 1999, and according to Polak, the food quality has never been better.

"What Valerie has done is bring the kosher dining experience into the 21st century," he says. "It's very unusual. Kosher dining rooms historically across the country have been the 'sleepy hollows' of campus dining. They're usually very tiresome. No one's connected, and people forget that eating has got to be at some level fun."

To earlier generations of American Jews, kosher food had a distinctly Eastern European bias: lots of roast chicken, blintzes, stuffed cabbage, egg noodles with kasha, and calorie-rich potato kugel. But while such fare is still popular for Sabbath meals and holidays, kosher cuisine has expanded to include more international flavors, as cooks find creative ways to work within strict dietary laws. At Hillel House that translates to dishes like beef or tofu ravioli with a nondairy alfredo sauce, Mexican spiced chicken wings, and vegetarian lo mein, all presented at display stations behind glass.

Kosher meat comes from only certain types of animals and the slaughtering has to be performed under specific, nearly painless conditions. The laws of kashrut prohibit combining dairy items with meat and poultry, but fish is pareve, or neutral, and is allowed on dairy days, so Lareau serves gourmet-quality entrees like pan-seared salmon or trout amandine.

Burrito bars, cooked-to-order stir fries, and custom-made omelettes also win applause for Lareau and chef Cecil Thomas. "Aramark said to me, go in there and jazz it up a bit," Lareau says. "It doesn't have to look kosher and act kosher anymore."

Any student on the University's meal plan can eat at Hillel for an additional 85 cents per meal. The dining room is also open to faculty and staff, who pay in cash.

Aaron Weinberg (CAS'04) says the Hillel House food was a major reason for his choosing BU, as few institutions he looked at offered more than a kosher dinner on Friday nights.

"A lot of my friends who are not Jewish or don't keep kosher find that the Hillel dining room is the best food on campus," Weinberg says. "I think that comes from the fact that Val and Cecil put together amazing dishes that we've never had at home."

Daughter of a chef, Lareau cooked her way through college and became a food consultant to restaurants all over the United States, most of them French. Although she is not Jewish, she has by necessity learned many of the dietary laws on the job.

"It's admirable that kids are coming here because they have a belief system that they live by," she says. "My aim is to make it easier and more enjoyable for them to maintain their faith at BU."

At present Hillel's capacity is about 160 students per meal. That will change with the construction of the Florence and Chafetz Hillel House at the corner of Bay State Road and Granby Street, where the new dining room will seat 256. Polak anticipates that groundbreaking will begin in August and the building will be complete by spring 2003.

The Hillel House kosher dining room is open to all students, faculty, and staff for lunch (11:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m.) and dinner (5 to 7 p.m.) Monday through Friday, lunch on Saturday, and dinner on Sunday.

9 March 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations