Students said housing staff at Taylor Place residence hall on the Downtown campus hosted a dinner Thursday night for about a dozen people unable to go home for Thanksgiving.
Management and entrepreneur junior Erika Vega, a community assistant at the residence hall, helped cooked dinner along with her hall coordinator Bryan Custer and his wife. Sun Devil Dining donated the food.
“The idea was to ensure that residents that couldn’t go home to spend Thanksgiving with their families or friends would not be alone or miss out on a delicious Thanksgiving dinner,” Vega said.
With Taylor Place almost empty over Thanksgiving break, Vega said she didn’t want residents to feel “weirded out.”
“I wanted to make sure that residents knew that they wouldn’t have to spend Thanksgiving eating cold cheese sandwiches in their room,” she said. “Since I live in Taylor Place year-round, I can understand the strangeness of suddenly finding the bustling residence hall empty.”
Nutrition freshman Victoria Morlan couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving and was grateful she had a dinner to attend.
“Since my family lives in Colorado, it didn’t seem worth it to go home for this short amount of time,” Morlan said. “I don’t know what I would have done if they didn’t have a dinner here.”
Morlan also praised the food at the event and said there was a wide variety of it.
“There was a lot of stuff I was used to and a lot of stuff I wasn’t,” she said. “There was everything from turkey to stuffing to pasta salad and cherry pie.”
Vega said the dinner was like any other Thanksgiving meal.
“It was hurried, but organized,” she said. “We pulled together dining hall tables into one long table and then had all the food set out in the community kitchen, buffet style.”
Criminology freshman Sabrina Kourafas attended the event because it was “free food” and there weren’t many food places open in downtown Phoenix.
“The dinner was great; it was a good idea,” Kourafas said. “Especially because I couldn’t go home.”
Kourafas was surprised with the amount of food at the dinner.
“It looked like there was a lot of leftover food,” she said. “It would have been great if they had left the food somewhere downstairs so we could come back and get some, especially because the dining hall was closed.”
Vega said residents were encouraged to take leftover food up to their room so they could enjoy it over the long weekend.
Kourafas’ favorite part of the meal was the pasta salad.
“It wasn’t a normal Thanksgiving dish,” Kourafas said. “The variety of dishes was interesting.”
Part of the idea was to provide a “familial atmosphere” to residents who couldn’t go home, Vega said.
“It was a rewarding experience and reminded me that you don’t have to be home to feel the warmth of family,” she said.
Reach the reporter at
Tksincla@asu.edu
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