Forbidden places on campus: this is where all the food for the canteens and catering is prepared

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Ever wondered who makes sure there’s coffee and tea ready for your meeting? Or where those sandwiches and snacks come from at the Opening of the Academic Year, the university’s anniversary or your graduation ceremonies?

All that food and drink is prepared on the ground floor of the Van der Goot Building, in the kitchen run by Vitam. The caterer not only provides food at events but also runs the restaurant in Mandeville, the street food bar in Theil, two coffee bars and nearly forty snack vending machines across campus.

“Sometimes we cater events for as many as eight hundred people”, says Michel Flaton, Vitam’s general manager. He gives a tour of the kitchen where all the food is prepared. In front of the kitchen is a hall filled with crates of coffee and tea pots, fruit, a giant soup kettle and sandwiches. They are orders for meetings and gatherings all over campus that day. Vitam staff deliver them in handcarts to the right locations. “Today is a quiet day. We only have forty orders. On some days there can be as many as one hundred and forty.”

Inside the kitchen there are cupboards with hundreds of coffee pots, enormous cold stores and freezers, and shelves stacked with herbs and sauces. On the ‘hot side’ of the kitchen, where – as the name suggests – hot food is prepared, chef Harold is frying forty croquettes. “I really enjoy working here”, he says as he slices soft white rolls and places the croquettes inside. “There’s a real family feeling here in the kitchen.”