Great Scot April 2019 Great Scot_156_April_2019_Online | Page 64

Development
Bon Appétit! … but it’s
not just about appeasing
hunger on the Hill
‘The shared meal elevates eating from a
mechanical process of fuelling the body to a
ritual of family and community, from the mere
animal biology to an act of culture.’
Michael Pollan, In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
A veritable feast for the eyes greeted the
entire boarding community at Scotch on
their return to School for the start of the 2019
academic year: a complete transformation of
their social and culinary heart — their Dining Hall.
Applying the principle that ‘the gentle art
of gastronomy is a friendly one. It hurdles the
language barrier, makes friends among civilised
people and warms the heart’ ¹ — and perhaps,
quite frankly, because it all needed a bit of an
update — significant works were undertaken to
improve the ambience and quality of dining at
Scotch for our boarding fraternity.
Gastronomy on the Hill? Absolutely, as the
accompanying photographs attest.
The substantial makeover involved creating
a space with an atmosphere more aligned with
a restaurant than a cafeteria. Works included
a redesigned entry with retractable doors,
the removal of the brick and glazed wall to
the breezeway, and a totally new servery with
two flat induction hot plates, along with a live
cooking station and stone benchtops.
The servery walls have been relined with
timber panels and new joinery units. The
lighting now features new uplighting and
downlighting. The carpet has been replaced
throughout, with new vinyl flooring to all servery
areas. The interior has been entirely repainted,
64
Great Scot Number 156 – April 2019
and concrete columns rendered to be a feature
within this newly completed dining space.
Interestingly, as an aside, a recent study
undertaken of formal dining at Cambridge
Colleges ² found that ‘having had the same
“authentic” experience of college dining, and
in some cases having been part of the same
dining societies, creates a connection and
sense of identification that graduates are able to
leverage strategically throughout their careers’.
According to the authors of this study, ‘Dining is
perhaps the most important of rituals because it
is enacted so frequently and it is a ritual that all
students experience.’ ³
Pleasingly for all Scotch boys, the same
positive camaraderie being experienced by
boarders on the Hill will soon be applied like
‘a kind of social glue that binds the network
together’ 4 when the Keon-Cohen Dining Hall
comes into being for the beginning of the 2020
academic year.
PATTY WALLACE-SMITH –
DEVELOPMENT OFFICE
1 Samuel Chamberlain
2 Tina Dacin, Kamal Munir and Paul Tracey,
Formal Dining at Cambridge Colleges: Linking
Ritual Performance and Institutional Maintenance,
Academy of Management (Decembe r, 2010)
3 Ibid, p.1412
4 Ibid, p.1412
TOP LEFT: DINING IN THE VINES. TOP RIGHT: HUGH KING.
ABOVE CENTRE: HARRY WILCOX, BAILEY DALE AND HARRY
SHAO. ABOVE CENTRE RIGHT: DEAN OF BOARDING, TIM
BYRNES. ABOVE RIGHT: HUGH NIXON, OSCAR NG AND
CAPTAIN OF THE HILL, LUCA NEERHUT. RIGHT: HEALTHY FARE