Cafeteria
Valhall as we have called our cafeteria for the past years, has become a very important part of our every day life at school. I have the honor and privilege to run one of the biggest classrooms of ISS. No restaurant or canteen in Norway has the chance to serve such a variation, in age and nationality, of customers and guests. My job is very simple for me to do "Make food". This is what I am trained for. I discovered the challenge of serving children from 5 to 18 years old when a 1st grade student came to me and told me: "JP your mush potatoes ain’t so good today and the hot dog tastes funny." Since that day I realized that I could always count on honest feedback from my customers.
The cafeteria of the International School of Stavanger is dedicated to providing any of its students with the possibility to purchase food on campus. This service is provided with the focus on health, nutrition, safety and the development of social skills. We dedicate ourselves to make available to any age-group of students, food prepared from fresh products, keeping away as far as possible pre made food coming from the industry. A selection of homemade salads, sandwiches, soups and hot lunches is available. Our goal is to enable students to understand the value of nutrition to reach academic and athletics goals required in their school career as well as for the rest of their life.
Going into a little bit more detail, we have lunch service for kindergarten, first and second grades at the table. This service is supervised by personnel from the cafeteria, making sure that lunch (brought from home or purchased at school) will be eaten the way it should be eaten, that the fruit in the lunch box or on the tray will not go straight into the food scrap bucket.
We also support the world wide campaign of "5 a day" by offering to all grades of primary school the possibility to purchase a fruit card. This program covers the snack during school hours with fresh fruit every day during the school year.
Vegetarian alternatives are available every day at least represented in form of soup or hot lunch and permanently present in our sandwich and salad menu .
In conclusion I also would like to demystify the closed doors policies of my fellow chefs by stating that the door to the cafeteria is always open to any one for suggestions and feedback.