As a Brown student and as a human who cares even the minimum amount about succeeding in my classes, I have been to both the Rock and the SciLi countless times. I’m also an emotional eater who consumes sugary snacks under the guise of “needing fuel for motivation.” Really, I just like cookies. Who doesn’t?
With that in mind, I ventured to both of Brown’s campus library cafés to reassume my role as acclaimed food critic and give you, dear reader, the inside information on the best place for coffee and processed snacks around campus. Let the duel begin.
The Rock
The Rock’s Café Cart has recently been remodeled, and thus gets a high style and cleanliness rating. It can be found to the right upon entering the library, through a new pair of shiny glass doors.
The Rock’s Café Cart has a decent selection of products. The café carries my favorite packaged cookies (with M&Ms, natch) and brownies, in addition to a few others dubiously dubbed “Rhode Island Classics.” The most notable of these alternative snacks is the chocolate bread, because sometimes maybe a brownie isn’t enough like regular ol’ sliced bread? This little eatery also sells muffins, bagels, packaged snacks like chips and granola bars, yogurt, hummus and pretzels, and drinks. They carry Ratty coffee, but the real gem is a nice selection of teas, of which my personal recommendation if you’re going caffeine-free is Mint Majesty.
To get a more in-depth picture of the Rock Café, I sampled the chocolate bread, and here are my very scientific findings: there’s something weird going on up in there. Cinnamon? Artificial flavors or sweeteners? Unclear to even a palette as advanced as mine. This extraneous flavor was enough to make me question the “Rhode Island Classics” label.
And although the Rock Café has a great variety, it often doesn’t quite have the food I actually want. The cookies always leave me feeling nauseated, though simultaneously at-ease knowing they were produced in a factory totally free of nuts and nut residue. No, I do not have a nut allergy. There is plenty of gum available for purchase under the counter, but no mints. Mints are much more efficient breath fresheners and they never hurt your jaw. Get some mints, Rock Café. And if you’re gonna carry Chobani, carry the fucking peach, okay? Strawberry banana? What is this, amateur hour? And finally, during a late-night study sesh, sometimes all I want is a good, old-fashioned chocolate bar. And this is the Rock Café’s biggest fault: all it has are those weird ~awake~ caffeinated chocolate bars. Unacceptable.
The SciLi Café
The SciLi Café is, for all intents and purposes, very, very similar to the Rock Café. Each eatery carries a very similar selection of products. That said, I found the SciLi Café to pull slightly ahead of the Rock Café for reasons to follow.
Starting with the atmosphere, the SciLi Café is tucked away behind a violently lime green wall in the ground floor lobby of the SciLi. Open to the soft chatter of group work, my only complaint concerning the SciLi Café’s atmosphere is that the aisle lined on one side with the check-out counter and on the other with cooler shelves of food feels slightly too narrow for multiple people to occupy simultaneously.
The SciLi’s food selection is superior to the Rock’s. In addition to carrying the yogurts and smaller, packaged snacks of the Rock, the SciLi Café also carries bigger lunch items like sushi and even small sandwiches.
I sampled the sushi to get some sense of the quality of these higher-end meal items, and here is what I would advise: avoid the sushi, primarily because it is very expensive and points are gold, man. If you are going to get sushi, get the veggie roll. Fish is questionable when you don’t know from where it’s come or when it was sliced and rolled up amongst cucumbers in a little seaweed cocoon. Where the California roll’s pink “crab” fell short, the veggie roll excelled, packing a healthy punch of carrots, cucumber, and avocado.
The SciLi has similar failings to the Rock: namely, no mints. The SciLi does, newly, carry straight up chocolate bars, though.
The one aspect that truly sets the SciLi Café apart from that of the Rock? Its vending machine. When the weird chocolate bread and aging sushi just won’t cut it, you just cannot go wrong with Strawberry Poptarts.
In conclusion…
Rock Café: no stars given.
SciLi Café: one star for Poptarts.
Image via.