Making Vegetables Cool Again: Cowpie Cafe Hits Record Numbers
Watson Jones | October 4, 2023
Warren Wilson College’s (WWC) vegan and vegetarian dining location Cowpie Cafe is seeing record numbers of customers this semester. As both the lunch lines and the love for the establishment across campus steadily grow, students on the crew stay dedicated to keeping up with the new levels of demand.
“130 [people] has been our maximum — somewhere around there — consistently through meals,” said Layla McDaniel, a second-year student at WWC, who has been working on the Cowpie Cafe Crew for three semesters, including this one. They began working in the kitchen their freshman year.
“It's been a weird learning curve having to do vegan and gluten-free stuff,” McDaniel said. “But I was doing catering a little bit beforehand, so I have already been doing large-scale baking. And it's been fun, trying to figure out all the recipes.”
James Davis has been with the crew since he was a freshman. Davis — a creative writing major and musician in his junior year — is fast approaching two and a half years on the crew, making him one of the more experienced chefs in the Cowpie kitchen.
Regarding customers served, Davis agrees with McDaniel; this year's patronage of Cowpie Cafe has been record-setting. In part, he attributes this to the kitchen's current manager, Mia Adelman.
“I think Mia [Adelman] has really taken Cowpie and just brought it to the next level in many ways,” Davis said. “She's changed the recipes and whatnot — the food is just better.”
Cowpie manager Adelman is not the only one tweaking recipes. Student chefs making their own adjustments to the ways the dishes are prepared is a staple of the vegan and vegetarian kitchen. McDaniel has made several changes to the menu, such as adding a pizza dinner and experimenting with the baked goods recipes.
“I'm really lucky that our manager is like ‘Hey, Layla, you bake and I don't— What do you think?’, so there are a few recipes that I have experimented with,” McDaniel said. “Mostly the cakes — cakes come out weird with gluten-free flour, and we've been trying to figure out how to make them taste less gluten-free.”
Davis, too, has worked towards improvements in the Cowpie Cafe’s recipe book.
“All last year, I’d wake up at 8:30 and go do the Pad Thai,” Davis said. “I kind of perfected the cooking of that, and the cooking time. Rice noodles are very sensitive, you know — they cook very quickly.”
In addition, Davis has conducted serious experimentation with the Cowpie drinks and juices.
While he emphasized Adelman’s management as a key element of Cowpie’s recent surge in popularity, Davis also attributes the recent trend to serving more vegetarian food in addition to the vegan options always available. Despite the cafe’s roots as a vegan establishment for students who felt their dietary options were limited at Gladfelter, this recent shift to include vegetarian cuisine has allowed for some of the establishment’s more popular recent meals, like mac and cheese night.
McDaniel said that this creative freedom in the kitchen is one of the cafe’s strengths.
“We come up with our own recipes — we find them online and convert them to bigger [batches] as long as it follows our standards,” McDaniel said. “You can come into Cowpie and give us one of your recipes, and maybe we'll make it. We're always looking for new things. But we are able to be more creative because we don't have to follow as many Sodexo rules.”
Though this increased engagement with the campus is rewarding for the chefs in the Cowpie kitchen, there are some stressful elements that come with the increased numbers.
“There is definitely an upward cap; we're still learning where that is,” McDaniel said. “Some meals, we're doing 130. Some meals we’re doing like, maybe 90, so we’re always trying to figure out which meals bring the most people, and how much we have to make of [those meals].”
McDaniels and Davis mentioned that compost rates — one of the kitchen’s metrics for how popular a meal is — are still low. When food is composted, much of the food waste is donated to the farm crew for pig feed, which lowers the net amount of food waste from the cafe even further.
While food waste remains largely manageable for the cafe, one thing does not; the serving line. Students who eat regularly at Cowpie will have noticed lines stretching out of Lower Gladfelter, past the staircase, and often into the hallway leading to the post office. While this is not always the case, Davis speculates on ways Cowpie could decrease the lines and serve customers quicker.
“I've been thinking about just preparing plates and popping them out,” Davis said. “And obviously, if they give me some stipulation like ‘Oh, I don't want this’ I'll do that. But I think it’d be more effective if we just did the plates down the line and handed them out to people— That would make it faster. But then some people would get things that they [didn’t want], and therefore more stuff would end up in the compost.”
Considering that the size of the kitchen only allows about four people to work optimally together at one time, there is no easy solution for this issue.
More information about Cowpie and digital access to their menu can be found online.