Catered accommodation

Just look at accommodation options for York, and am wondering about catered food.

I really like the look of James college, but it only does catered food and I was hoping for self-catered.

My main concern about catered is how healthy it is (sounds fussy I know), is the food bought in bulk- kind of like ready meal standard? I’m hesitant as I don’t like to eat things with a lot of salt/fat/grease?

Thanks for any insight you can give me

Reply 1

Puddles the Monkey

Hi - sorry you haven't had a response to this yet. I'm just going to bump the thread in the hope that someone sees this and can help :h:

University of York

York

Reply 2

username2488767

Original post by els1313

I'll be honest. My first piece of advice (and of everyone I know) is to go self-catered if you have the option. The catered option only gives you breakfast and evening meal Mon-Fri. That means that you're still in charge of buying/making lunch every day and all weekend meals. For the cost of a week of shopping on self-catered, you'd be saving money by cooking for yourself every day and the kitchen facilities are much better.

But if you decide that you would like James college (all catered), then you'd be eating in the Roger Kirk Centre dining hall. It's pretty standard (I eat there most lunches as I'm a psychology student so it's next to my department). There are different meals each day but always the basics like burger and chips, jacket potatoes, and different chinese dishes (there's a lot of international students who prefer their own cuisine).

However, I would day that the variety isn't great. Besides those I've stated, there's usually about 2-3 other options. I've heard that you get something like 6 items for breakfast so people tend to get bagels etc. and have them for lunch rather than buying lunch separately. I imagine the evening meal options are more real meals compared to some of the basic lunch foods but there's still not a huge variety. I've included a PDF link to this week's meal plan so you can have a look at the foods on offer.

https://www.york.ac.uk/media/food-and-bars/documents/menus/Weekly%20menu%20Catered%20Halls%20-%20wk10.pdf

I guess there's a mixture of healthy and non-healthy options for each day and they offer vegan and vegetarian options which are typically healthier. They don't display nutritional information but you can probably tell from the menu. My impression from the lunches is that the food can be quite greasy or has a lot of sauce tbh.