Collins Dining Hall, Claremont McKenna College campus (roughly Sixth and Mills), Claremont

Cafeterias at the Claremont Colleges are open to the public and well worth a visit, if you don’t mind eating alongside vibrant youngsters who are almost uniformly toned, healthy and better off than you. (I kind of mind, but I make the occasional exception.)

I’ve previously posted about Scripps and Pitzer’s cafeterias and have eaten at Pomona’s, pre-blog. Recently I scheduled a lunch at CMC’s cafeteria with a campus friend, my first meal there. Describing where things are on a college campus isn’t easy, but we entered on foot at Mills and Sixth, northwest corner, followed a path a few yards northwest and were soon there.

You pay upon entering: $13 if you’re on your own, $7.50 if you’re the guest of someone on campus. The choices are almost dizzying. There are six stations: @Home, Farm to Fork, Expo & Options, Grill, Stocks and Ovens. That means, respectively, American comfort food, vegan, ethnic, burgers, soups and pizzas.

I opted for @Home in part because there was no line, unlike Expo and Grill, getting a pork chop with mashed potatoes and vegetables, plus a salad with some fruit. My friend, who’s vegetarian, got roasted pepper hummus, a tomato salad and basmati rice.

Even the beverage station was an ode to plenty. I bypassed the sodas, vitamin waters and tea to get a strawberry lemonade, and then kicked myself for not seeing the two aguas frescas.

The dining room, while crowded, was also lovely, with floor to ceiling windows looking out over the campus and providing lots of natural light.

When we left, the cafeteria was mostly shut down (they close between meals) and the soft-serve ice cream machine was already shut off, darn the luck. They still had two kinds of cookies, two kinds of cake and one kind of cupcake. I took a chocolate chip cookie. It was dry and quickly abandoned. It was the only disappointing part of the meal.

So, it’s a cafeteria, and it’s cafeteria food, but probably not like anything you remember. Like Claremont’s other dining halls, Collins rivals any buffet in the area.