Skidmore College Murray-Aikins Dining Hall

Oops! Need to update.

Why oops? Well, I have a young friend that is a student here. She has severe allergies to certain foods. She specifically asked if a particular food item might have been cross contaminated and was assured that it wasn't.

She was hospitalized. Thankfully, she survived.

She will never eat here again, obviously.

Yeah-oops is an understatement and one star is too many.

I went to Skidmore College as a freshmen for school year 2011-2012 before I transferred. I was there for only a year, but a year is enough to get to know a dining hall very well. And I really enjoyed eating here because as a college student on the grind 24/7, food is one of the most vital source of joy. Running around preparing for transfer application left me with barely any time for extracurricular activities, so I focused on getting the most entertainment out of the dining hall.

I hope they still does it today, but when I was at Skidmore, students were able to buy unlimited swipes into the dining hall. So I was able to enter the dining hall as many times as I wanted in a day.

To sum it up, the strongest dishes here are burgers, the sandwich bar, and dairy products. They would have burgers on a certain day of the week (I think it was Monday for me), and the burgers were so good I got them every single week. I missed having my burger every week when school was out for the summer.

I also remember visiting the sandwich bar pretty often, where student workers would make sandwiches any way you requested. I liked having my bread toasted and smeared with the avocado spread made in-house. I'm really glad I got to enjoy that spread so many times, because in the real world, you never encounter unlimited supply of avocado products. Ever.

Skidmore students were spoiled with dairy options too. You can get a variety of milk from tap, not from a measly individual-sized milk carton. It's like getting soda from a soda dispensing machine, but bigger and more sophisticated. I didn't think it was a big deal at the time, but now I think it was a great idea since there won't be waste created from milk cartons this way. And the milk tasted good too, of course.

I was fortunate to experience great dining experience as well at Rice University where I transferred to, but that's a story for another day.

My wife and I came here for dinner last Saturday and, despite not being students, we managed to find the place pretty easily. The settings are pleasant for a college cafeteria, with the various food stations arranged in a circular arrangement with seating available all around them in large and small rooms. High tops, bar stools, large booths, small tables.... anything you could want, they had. It wasn't too crowded, but it had enough young students to make me feel old.

Their online menu listed the entrees for the night at each station (one was a "Diner" station, one was a pizzeria, one was a vegetarian area, one was an Asian area, etc.) I figured this was in addition to the basics: subs, burgers, chicken nuggets, fries, a full fruit and vegetable bar, etc. This was not the case.

No, instead what I found went like this: the pasta station had one pan of partially dried out plain spaghetti and a pot of sauce that looked like it hadn't been touched all night; the Ramen station had two types of broth and two options: vegetables or dried out chicken; the pizza section had multiple types of pizza but the two I tried tasted heavily of dried oregano, and the Deli section was closed. Now, for the good parts: the Asian section had meatballs with a soy glaze (which was pretty good), and the Diner entree was Huli Huli chicken with jasmine coconut rice which I really enjoyed.

I came soon after they opened for dinner service because I wanted fresh food. Very little tasted (or looked) really fresh to me. They had a decent salad bar but no fruit bar, though I saw some students walking around with bananas and applies. I was hoping for some cut up fruit. The breakfast cereal section was impressive, but I wasn't there for breakfast. The dessert options were three shelves of lemon meringue pie, three shelves of vegan brownies (decent), and vanilla soft serve (the chocolate was broken).

Again, my first impressions were that this was nothing like the large cafeteria I was expecting it to be. But, my review isn't based on that flawed comparison. Though it was all-you-can-eat, I also incorrectly assumed it would be "all-you-might-want" and that was not the case. Some had said they served really high quality food but I didn't get that impression at all. Quality ranged from very good to below average. It is a typical college cafeteria, and it seemed hit or miss. It was a fun experience, but I am glad I am not a student who has to eat here every day.

Coming from a Skidmore family and as an alumni I am shocked to see the state of the dining hall. There has been an exponential decline in food quality since about 2015/2016. It is too bad to hear the school was having supply chain issues post covid but in 2022, I've been hearing the same excuse for years with little action and continuous decline. If you are going to force the students living in dorms to be on the meal plan, you can't expect them to rely on the salad and pasta bar, it's especially hard to be filled up with sufficient protein at the Murray.

My wife and I were looking for an affordable dining experience somewhere near Saratoga Spring's historic Beekman Art District where we were searching for collectible woolen pot holders, when we discovered this buffet on Yelp!. Murray-Atkins is situated within a residential community including tower apartments and a nice view of a broad forest. The buffet itself has a nice mini supermarket at its entrance, perhaps for nearby residents to grab a snack or a few grocery items. I admit I was confused at first by the diners scanning in with cards, but it seems Murray Atkins has some sort of membership program similar to Dave & Busters.

Architecturally, the interior is somewhat mind boggling. Picture Picasso meets Applebee's. There was an unusual disparity in warm and cold colors, one side being orange, the other a bluish-green theme. There seemed to be a lot of beatnik, Jack Kerouac, bohemian, Allen Ginsberg, Phishfan types on the red side. My wife whispered to me that she smelt the skunk! The blue side was more what you'd expect to see at any normal all you can eat buffet, a lot of people in sweatpants, mostly homegrown American, nothing unusual here.

This buffet is massive! And clearly quite popular with the Saratoga youth! My wife and I felt ten years younger being in this energetic crowd. We were also pleasantly surprised by the diversity in Saratoga Springs. There where whole tables of people from different races! Seating seemed help yourself, but the food was bountiful. We were especially fond of the Emily's Garden as there were a number of snazzy jazzy vegan friendly little numbers. My wife has a rather severe gluten allergy, so we were grateful for the gluten free items. Just one bite of wheat and she's bloated into an miserable elephantine monstrosity, and no one wants to deal with that on a three hour drive back to Poughkeepsie, NY.

Overall, I was rather impressed by Murray-Atkins. (They even let you cook your own eggs on a range in the back! I don't even know if that is legal!?) My only disappointment was the exit experience, where it is expected that you sort out your silverware and napkins along a conveyor belt. It felt a little authoritarian for my liberal inclinations.

We went last Thursday for supper and it was fantastic! So many selections of food and good variety of vegetarian (huge salad bar), meat lovers you will love this place ( I had grilled burger, lean pork chop, fresh steamed Salmon), oriental, Italian, etc. There are baked goods, good variety of pizza as you come in, tasty barley with mushrooms, rice, corn, kimchi, ice cream you can crank yourself, etc. place is clean n modern and very upbeat atmosphere. Would go again!

I'm a Senior at Skidmore and everyone loves the dining hall. It has so many options and the food is actually quite good. I definitely put on a few pounds freshman year.