Welcome to the first installment of the Ratty Roundup: a report of the delicious things I’ve found in dining halls that are worth sharing with you, gentle reader. It’s not uncommon to hear people complain about our dining halls — look at Sidechat on any given day and you can reliably find at least one or two comments slamming the Ratty with some kind juvenile zinger — but there are some gems hiding in Brown’s eateries, and I want to help you find them. Let’s get down to business.
While breakfast at the Sharpe Refectory or Verney-Woolley comes with its respective idiosyncrasies, the two dining halls are united in their baked goods. They can be hit or miss — don’t bother with the vegan Caribbean rum cake — but feeling adventurous the other Tuesday I decided to grab a ginger scone. It might seem dramatic to call a scone an adventurous choice, but a good one is hard to come by. Often the triangular pastry is a dry hockey puck that takes a cup or two of tea to choke down. But I found the inside of this one to be unbelievably tender and soft, and while I did pick around the candied ginger, the lemony glaze was a hit.
Unlike the Ratty at large, the Kosher Kitchen has a solid reputation among the student body. I found this reputation deserving the other day when I got some of their baba ganoush. Did it taste like eggplant? Not strongly, but it was creamy and pleasantly smoky. I topped it off with some olive oil from the salad line and scooped it up with some of the kosher pita that I had toasted in the panini press. Sometimes the key to a really exceptional Ratty meal is a little bit of culinary initiative.
With a fairly humble name, the paprika-roasted acorn squash might seem like a waste of time, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s surprisingly sweeter than their butternut squash and cut into adorable little cubes. Yes, it’s slightly oily, but the paprika isn’t overpowering and makes a nice topping for the spicy frizzled greens offered at the salad station. I like to make a dressing out of arugula pesto from the pasta line and a bit of red wine vinegar. It's a deeply satisfying salad, especially if you add sunflower seeds.
My monthly indulgence in meat happened to overlap with one particular night in the Ratty when they were offering what was essentially a chicken tender with a sticky, savory soy glaze and a smattering of scallions. Two content clucks from me! (Although probably not from the chickenIs who were industrially farmed.) That same night they were serving coconut rice — a little toothy for my liking but still tasty — and dry-fried green beans. Dry-frying is one of my favorite ways to prepare the bean, which involves cooking the slender veg in a shallow layer of oil until it becomes tender and its skin slightly wrinkles. The Ratty did a tasty rendition the other night. My only note: they could have been heavier on the garlic.
It seems appropriate to end on a sweet note. Here are two. Attentive dining-hall regulars will have noticed the salted dark chocolate shortbread last week. I’m convinced it’s inspired by this recipe from the controversial but well-loved recipe-writer Alison Roman. It’s a dense shortbread with slightly artificial vanilla flavor, which reminds me of my fondness for Lofthouse cookies. Shards of dark chocolate are speckled throughout, and crunch comes from both the perimeter of turbinado sugar and the generous — sometimes too generous — sprinkle of salt.
While I’m partial to the shortbread, the real standout of last week was the Cajun apple cake, plush beyond measure with a rounded but not overwhelming spice. Sure, there was remarkably little apple to be tasted, but it was pleasing in all the other ways a cake ought to be. I was delighted to discover a nutty brown butter icing too, and I shoved a second slice into a disposable coffee cup for the road.
As we make our way into the darker, colder parts of the semester, I anticipate Ratty menus of winter vegetables, like broccoli and cabbage, and my own increased longing for soups. I’m sure the future also holds more dining hall triumphs, some of which I might miss. So, if you have any recommendations, feel free to send them my way.
In the meantime, happy chewing!
Eleanor Barth Wu ’26 can be reached at eleanor_barth_wu@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
