About Us

We created collegefooddish.com because we know about college kids, colleges, and college food – and we know how tough it can be to get the inside story on college food.

We know about college kids because we have three of them.  We are Massachusetts-based parents of triplet sons who are students at three different colleges.

We know about colleges because we’ve had up-close views of the colleges our kids attend.  Also, as part of the college selection process our family visited dozens of colleges throughout the United States, so we learned a lot about many other colleges, too.  In fact, we ate a meal at every single college we visited, and we discovered that college food is literally all over the map.  Some colleges had amazing food in attractive settings, and some colleges offered food that was just as dismal as the college food we remembered from our own college days.  Once our sons began college, we discovered that the offerings were radically different even within a single campus, with some dining rooms having consistently limited or mediocre selections, and others having a better choice of popular foods.  Our sons were desperate for information about the food at their own colleges, and they also wanted to know about the nearby restaurants.  As parents, we were amazed to see that although we were paying the same steep tuition and fees for all of our sons’ schools, we were not getting similar values for their food.  Not even close.  We decided to create collegefooddish.com to help other families and students get the best food values during their college years.

We have other food credentials, too.  Elinor is a culinary school graduate who teaches baking and writes restaurant reviews for local magazines.  Together, Elinor and Robert have enjoyed 25 years of being “mystery diners” paid to offer constructive criticism about restaurant meals so that restaurant owners can better understand the diners’ experience.

Elinor Nelson and Robert Bargar