Homesick students didn’t have to travel far to eat their favorite home-cooked fish tacos or bratwurst Thursday. LSU Dining’s executive chef Jon Jackson prepared them on campus in The 459 Commons and The 5 as part of First Year Experience’s “Taste of Home” event.
“Taste of Home” is an event sponsored by LSU Dining and Chartwells Higher Education, a dining company that serves more than 230 universities nationwide. Chartwells regional catering director Cheramie Gosnell said they chose to host “Taste of Home” on Thursday because parents and students will be on campus celebrating family weekend, which begins today.
Parents and students were able to submit their own menus online for Jackson to cook.
“It’s just a lot of fun to let them have an input and submit their own menu,” Gosnell said. “We were really able to pull it together.”
Chartwells’ senior director of dining services Armando Chacon said this is the second time the dining hall has hosted the event, which launched in April.
He said it is important to students and their well-being to get a “taste of home” on occasion, which is why LSU Dining and Chartwells took on the event.
Chacon said Jackson cooks meals that originate in the United States. Most of the dishes featured at “Taste of Home” — which Chacon said is part of the university’s diversity initiative — are recipes native to Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Michigan, Massachusetts and some west coast states.
“Students have been real excited today because they’re seeing things that aren’t typically on the regular menu,” Chacon said. “We hope to do events like this more often because we have so many different cultures to represent, and we need to focus on that.”
Chacon said “Taste of Home” is not the only event of its kind that LSU Dining will host this semester. Other promotions like Dessert Day, American Heartland and a Halloween party are in the works.
Although mechanical engineering freshman Disha Shah eats at The 5 every day, she said she learned about “Taste of Home” via Snapchat because the menu was posted on the LSU campus story. Shah, who moved to Louisiana from India in 2012, said she was excited to see LSU making an effort to accommodate out-of-state students like herself.
Shah and her brother Rahul — a mechanical engineering junior who did not know about the event — ate Spanish rice and black beans because they were among the day’s vegetarian options, which Shah said are sometimes difficult to come across at The 5.
“Event food is typically much better,” Rahul said.

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Emily Brauner

LSU Dining Halls accomodate out of state students on Thursday, Oct. 1, by serving their favorite meals from their home state.