University of Penna Faculty Club

Maybe it’s because my undergrad had an extremely fancy and plush faculty club, but I was incredibly unimpressed by the Penn Faculty Club. First of all, the restaurant is all buffet style, for both breakfast and lunch, so that alone makes it feel more like a college cafeteria than a place you’d want to take someone for a nice meal. Service was pretty non-​existent, servers just stopped by to clean up your dishes every so often. What really grossed me out was the fact that they basically left all the dirty dishes on the tables after people left and didn’t bother to clean up anything until the end of the breakfast hour. Eww! I expect that at a Denny’s, not at a Hilton property.
The faculty club doubles as a restaurant for the Inn at Penn, so in all honesty, having been to many of their functions and events and enjoyed them, I expected better in terms of food. I went for a work breakfast and we had their buffet. It was pretty lame in terms of selection: scrambled eggs, bacon, some cheap fruit and yogurt, a few different types of pastries and bagels. There were no waffles or pancakes, and the fruit selection was pretty pathetic looking. I’ve had breakfasts with more variety at standard chain hotels for free. To add insult to injury, the meal was $ 20pp — so not worth it, even if it was on Penn’s tab. The final negative was when they made us leave because they had to «get ready for lunch» at 10:30am. Lame!
Skip this one — not worth the money or the effort, and honestly, you’d be better off getting a meal at Cosi or something down the street.

I was treated to lunch at the Faculty club, which is an unusual experience for staff, from what I gather, last Thursday. It was in celebration of completion of a project I’ve been working on. I hope we can celebrate more often, because it was very yummy and fun. Also, I love anything that’s all-​you-​can-​eat, so they get instant points for that.
The menu changes daily, you can find out what they have online every day. That day, they served pork tenderloin which was a bit on the dry side, ridiculously creamy and scrumptious cauliflower au gratin, honey glazed carrots and a spinach salad at the salad bar. I also had a big crusty roll and had to have seconds of the roll as well as seconds of the cauliflower. The dessert selection was a little less enticing, but I managed to grab the last slice of apple pie. They also had chocolate cake that looked nice, and cheesecake, but I would have like a couple more options. They have some healthy ice cream in the freezer that my coworker said was inedible. My pie was really yummy, I just would have liked to have a few more pie choices because dessert is important to me at a buffet style restaurant. Overall, the meal was really nice. I especially liked that although there were workers there, making sandwiches to order, the hot food was serve yourself. I’d rather decide how much I want of everything and that’s really how a buffet should be.