Rosty SorokaOf all the infrastructure upgrades on campus this year, my favourite has to be the new debit machine at La Pasta.
Some of the best food on campus can be found at HUB’s pasta shop. It has baked goods, warm drinks, a decent selection of paninis, and freshly-cooked pasta every day. Their spaghetti and meatballs are probably better than any spaghetti and meatballs of student-kitchen-origin. Besides the food, the venue’s location is in a prime, central location on the west half of HUB Mall; because it has a semi-private seating area for paying patrons, the restaurant gives students a not-free alternative to studying in HUB’s crowded terraces.
Until recently, accessing La Pasta’s premium-quality food (and chill study space) required you to do the following: arrive at La Pasta, realize you have no cash, journey to a debit machine, hope said debit machine still has $20 bills in it, and if it did, journey back to La Pasta to finally taste the fruits of the spaghetti gods. As someone who almost never carries cash, this barrier to entry crushed my campus dining morale. In the pre-debit-machine age of La Pasta, I ended up eating my sorrows at SUB’s L’Express, which meant a lot of overpriced sodium and bitter tomato sauce in my system. It’s not that I couldn’t pay the price of HUB’s superior pasta — I was just lazy. Having no cash also meant fighting for study space with the rest of the HUB Terrace Scholars, which is always a losing battle.
Now that La Pasta has a debit machine, there’s nothing holding me back from nourishing myself with good food after spending little energy. I can surrender my bank card and eat in peace, without having to extract my vulnerable liquid assets from the bank machine.
Never have I felt so excited to dump my food budget into a small business.
