With Redesign, Texas Christian University Sees Bright Future

Texas Christian University’s in-house design team had two overarching goals in renovating the nearly 18-year-old Market Square dining facility. First, they sought to create a destination dining spot for TCU students, and, second, to increase meal plan participation to keep pace with the university’s anticipated growth.

The resulting facility wowed everyone. Opened in August 2026, BLUU Dining in the Brown-Lupton University Union—part of a $17 million overhaul for the Union—has welcomed a record number of guests. The reimagined dining hall covers about 13,000 square feet, with an additional 4,500 square feet for the platforms and back-of-house. It’s bright, airy and open, offering seating for 550 inside and 120 on the patio. BLUU Dining features eight food platforms, including a to-go window for students on the move. Its support kitchen earned an all-new equipment refresh.

Arched windows bring in light and help draw students to the salad/deli area.

Less than two months after its debut, BLUU Dining meal tallies are averaging 4,000 per day. “That’s double our meal counts at the time we closed for renovation in December 2025,” says Associate Vice Chancellor Student Affairs Business and Operations Jude Kiah. As of press time, its peak day entailed some 5,700 meals. If pushed, “We could probably crank out 8,000 meals per day,” Kiah notes.

Texas Christian’s BLUU Dining, now a campus-wide destination, features an array of finish-to-order platforms in a bright, spacious setting.

Survey Surprise

Preliminary planning for BLUU Dining began in 2022 with a series of research surveys aimed at gauging student satisfaction with the Union’s Market Square.

“It took quite a bit of data analysis from multiple surveys to figure out that it was the facility—not the food—that students didn’t like,” Kiah recalls. “They perceived the previous dining hall as merely a self-serve cafeteria with premade food.”

Research showed that students valued made-to-order over speed-of-service, and had no issue with waiting for customized meals. “We didn’t believe it at first,” Kiah says. “We must have conducted at least six different surveys, both focus groups and actual surveys, before we finally trusted the results.

“It’s still shocking to me that students will line up 20 deep and not think a thing of it,” Kiah adds. “Our lines do move fast. The other day, I noticed the queue for bowls was 15 deep. When I timed how long it took for the final person to get their food, it was four minutes and 30 seconds.”

Good Growth

Next fall, TCU will add 2,500 beds on campus, Kiah notes.

The dining team opened East End, a dining hall on the opposite side of campus, in January 2025. Over the last two years, staff has revamped menus, with the help of Sodexo’s college dining concept One & All, to encourage dining interest. BLUU Dining aims to further that appeal. Meal plan enrollment currently stands at 6,300, with expectations of surpassing 8,000 in the coming year.

“Opening these two dining facilities has helped it all come together,” Kiah says.

The 120-seat outdoor terrace will be in use nearly year-round.

Designing BLUU

The TCU dining team who oversaw East End’s creation also led BLUU Dining’s renovation. The team includes Kiah, along with Director Facilities and Operations Miles Oller and Sodexo District Manager Scott Majestic.

Thanks to their hands-on experience with East End, “We were pretty assertive about what we wanted for BLUU, and what we didn’t,” Kiah recalls. The team started by addressing pain points in the previous dining hall, then assembled menus (relying on Sodexo’s branded One & All higher education menu program) and drafted equipment ideas. The Webb Foodservice Design team, who also worked on East End, helped confirm and finalize the equipment lists and layouts.

When the trio sat down to make preliminary plans for the new servery, each had a goal in mind. “My first thought was to get rid of walls and make everything brighter and more open,” Kiah says.

One of the biggest changes involved relocating the salad/deli/to-go platform away from the main area to give the remaining platforms room to breathe, Kiah adds. This move, near a wall of windows overlooking the campus, created a destination dining spot within the servery. “It’s become the most popular space in the facility,” he says. “Students want to sit there because it’s bright and has a view of the stadium.”

At Dash, students can grab a quick bite without entering the servery.

In an innovative twist, this platform’s to-go window, called Dash, opens into the entrance hallway, allowing time-pressed guests to pick up a premade sandwich or salad without entering the servery. “It’s an opportunity for us to basically steal seats, give students more options and potentially operate late into the evening with very little input from a labor perspective,” Kiah says.

Oller focused on improving back-of-house traffic flow by replacing the previous servery’s too-narrow afterthought of a passageway with a wide corridor. “The new service hall includes individual entrances to every platform, so there is no competition for space,” Oller says. “As amazing as the difference in the front of the house is, the real meat-and-potatoes of this renovation lies behind scenes in the ability to move product from A to B safely and efficiently.”

Oller and Majestic also looked at improving BLUU Dining’s “engine”—its support kitchen and walk-in cooler.

Changes to the support kitchen started with replacing the old, hard-to-clean tile flooring with epoxy flooring. “We had to remove everything to do the floors, and this led us to taking a hard look at the 15-year-old existing equipment,” Oller says. “I knew many of the pieces would not be worth reinstalling once we’d moved them three times, and so we took on the additional project of a one-for-one replacement of nearly everything down there.”

The support kitchen’s new walk-in cooler solved Majestic’s goal of streamlining receiving. “I wanted to be able to distribute incoming product efficiently,” he says, describing the previous convoluted system dictated by space constraints. “With our new 800-square-foot walk-in, we can roll pallets directly into the cooler, unload onto carts, then send product where it needs to go.”

Servery Highlights

Changes large and small add efficiency to the BLUU Dining servery. Planners chose equipment based on capacity, flexibility, maintenance needs and training needs.

The pizza oven serves as a key example. While the interior designers would have liked an eye-catching stone-hearth oven, the team insisted on an industrial-looking rotating pizza oven. “This thing can crank out 116 pizzas an hour and bake casserettes on the lower level,” Oller says. “One worker can be loading from the front and another worker unloading from the side—and no one has to stick their arms into a 550-degree oven.”

The rotating pizza oven can crank out 116 pizzas an hour.

Other equipment favorites include the customer-facing soft-serve machine (“high-end, low amperage draw, reliable, easy to operate and perfect for this kind of environment,” Oller notes); the round griddle that doubles as a plancha; and a pasta station that can pivot to serving breakfast items as needed.

When it came to choices of high-tech, computer-controlled equipment versus low-tech, the latter generally won. “I’d rather buy ‘tanks’—pieces of equipment that will just keep working, and where you don’t need a master’s degree to figure them out,” Oller says. “The funny thing is, the hardest units for us to replace were some 30-year-old oven ranges still in use from the original makeover. Kenny, one of our maintenance techs, fought me pretty hard because they had never broken down.” The new pieces were by the same supplier. (Kenny was pleased.)

Future maintenance concerns also dictated equipment choices. “We need to avoid one brand of griddle because we’ve had issues getting them repaired around here,” Oller notes. “And we avoid a particular warewasher brand for the same reason.”

TCU’s equipment service company also provided input. “When we picked out a new type of, say, fryer, our service rep researched the prices of its thermostats or other repair parts to give us an idea of future maintenance costs and longevity,” adds Oller.

A Look Ahead

“We needed BLUU Dining to have some gravity (compared to East End), and it is definitely doing that,” Kiah says. “Now we just have to operate it. It’s off to a very good start.”

FACTS

BLUU DINING AT
TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY
FORT WORTH, TEXAS

OPENED: August 2026

CAMPUS POPULATION: 13,500, including about 5,700 living on campus

SIZE: 17,500 square feet across servery, BOH and seating areas

SEATING: 550 seats, plus 120 patio seats

BLUU DINING MEAL PRICES: Breakfast, $12.50; lunch, $14.50; dinner, $16.50

TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY: Jude Kiah, associate vice chancellor student affairs business and operations; Miles Oller, director facilities and operations; Scott Majestic, Sodexo district manager

CONSULTANT: Mike Browne, senior project manager; Daniel Roberts, associate principal; Webb Foodservice Design, Dallas

ARCHITECT: CannonDesign, Houston

DEALER: Baring Industries Foodservice Equipment Co., Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (servery); Mission Restaurant Supply, Fort Worth (support kitchen)

WEBSITE: dining.tcu.edu

KEY EQUIPMENT

Throughout

Streivor hoods

BSI food shields

3M water filtration systems

Advance Tabco hand sinks

Fisher hand sink faucets

Metro roll-in racks

Salads/Deli/To-Go

Vollrath soup well

TurboChef speed oven

Hatco panini grills

RPI deli display case

Panasonic rice cookers

Traulsen two-door roll-in refrigerators

Federal Industries cold display cases

Bizerba slicer

ColdZone remote refrigeration rack

Breakfast

Silver King milk dispenser

Follett ice maker

Hatco heat lamp

Vollrath drop-in hot/cold unit

Taylor soft-serve machine

Bakery

Traulsen two-door roll-in refrigerator

Southbend ventless convection oven

RPI bread display

Hatco conveyor toaster, drop-in hot well, heat lamp, hot/cold shelf

Franke coffee machine

Beverage-Air undercounter refrigerator

Grill

Montague plancha, salamander, cold base, countertop broiler

Pitco fryer

Traulsen reach-in freezer

Vollrath drop-in hot/cold unit

Hatco heat lamp, drop-in heated shelf

Hearth

Traulsen two-door roll-in refrigerator

DoughPro dough press

Roto-Flex pizza oven

Hatco undercounter hot holding cabinet, drop-in heated shelves, heat lamps, decorative lamps

Vollrath soup well

Pitco pasta cooker

Jade undercounter refrigerator, open burners with cold rail

Entree

Traulsen two-door roll-in heated cabinet, reach-in refrigerator, reach-in freezer

Pitco fryer, dump stations

Montague countertop broiler, plancha, cold base

Beverage-Air undercounter refrigerator

Hatco hot/cold shelf, drop-in heated shelf, hot well, heat lamps

Cres Cor carving station

Alto-Shaam holding cabinet

Global

American Range countertop gyro broiler

Wood Stone vertical rotisserie

Montague plancha, cold base

Pitco fryer, dump station with heat lamp, pasta cooker

Traulsen reach-in freezer, sandwich prep table

Hatco heat lamps, drop-in heated shelf

Evo drop-in electric cooktop

Vollrath drop-in hot/cold units

Jade open burners, cold base

Warewashing/Servery Back-of-House

Aerowerks accumulator, hose reel

Salvajor trough collector

ThermalRite walk-in cooler

Cambro Mfg. dry storage shelving

ColdZone remote refrigeration rack

Follett ice maker

Editor’s note: This list only shows new equipment for the servery and not the support kitchen.

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