South Campus Café Exterior (Sam Bowman)

The University of Chicago’s South Campus Café and Convenience Store opened without fanfare or promotion today on the Ellis Avenue side of the new South Campus Residence Hall (6031 S. Ellis Ave.). For what I have heard talked about as a welcoming gesture towards the north Woodlawn community that the new building abuts, it is not very visible. The café is on the euphemistically termed garden level—a section of the basement with enough space around it to have windows—and is reached by steep stairs leading down from the edge of the dorm’s newly built plaza. Entering also currently involves walking past the café and then through two sets of unmarked doors. It took me three tries and some gestures from the cashier. Then again, it seems to have been built more for undergraduate regulars than for anyone else.

South Campus Café Interior (Sam Bowman)

The Café is operated by Campus Dining Services (read: Aramark), and so their primary target is likely undergraduates in housing. The restrictive Flex-dollar account included with mandatory meal plans ensures that students will be able to afford the convenience store’s unusually high prices. The 7am to 3am hours should also keep people coming when nothing within a mile is open save for Campus Dining Service’s identically priced Bart Mart on 57th Street. (Incidentally, the de facto name Bart Mart for what has officially been Maroon Market has finally been recognized on the Campus Dining website.)

South Campus Café Interior (Sam Bowman)

The quality is nothing special. The convenience store shares Bart Mart’s combination of name-brand snack staples and bizarrely expensive organic and allergy-friendly options, and the café still seems to be working out some kinks. The pastries looked pallid and the hot chocolate had neat layers of milk and syrup. The café space was pleasant enough though, and I was surprised to find that most of the coffee and café supplies come from Hyde Park’s own Ambassador Organics, a young company founded by former U.S. Senator and New Zealand ambassador Carol Moseley Braun.