‘I don’t think anyone here is happy’

“With change come challenges” an apology email from Parkhurst Dining read after hundreds of complaints were leveled against it earlier this semester. But according to rank-and-file dining employees, the challenges keep mounting. They say that the company remains riddled with problems, with employees being subjected to an unaccommodating work environment, leading to confusion and anger among the staff.

“The morale has just hit the bare bottom while we’re still trying to put food out for you guys,” Kyle Davis, a sous chef at Marquis Dining Hall, said. Davis said he is quitting on Monday, and he is far from the first to quit this semester.

Several dining staff members have estimated that about a dozen Marquis employees have quit since the college hired Parkhurst Dining this summer, while another 10 have been said to quit from Upper Farinon Dining Hall in the same time frame. Dining administrators expected turnover from Bon Appétit, the former dining provider, but employees have claimed that the resignations occurred after their Parkhurst contract was already signed. This is a part of a worsening “short-staffing issue,” according to Davis.

“It’s just become a toxic environment,” one Marquis chef, who wished to remain anonymous, said. “All of the good cooks that stayed saw the handwriting on the wall and decided ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with this.’ They’ve been jumping ship.”

The Marquis chef said he is quitting next week.

“I don’t think that they’re short-staffed to the extreme,” Geoff Labe, the college’s business services assistant vice president, said. Campus head chef Jason Moyer wrote in an email that he did not know how many employees had quit.

Several remaining dining employees have expressed frustration and disappointment with the work environment under Parkhurst Dining.

“From what we see in the back … the [management] is straight up disrespectful,” Davis said. “They’ve accused two workers of stealing furniture when the furniture just wasn’t there. They’ve fired somebody who was a [temporary worker], saying that she was too slow, but her speed was fine.”

“One of the personal reasons I really don’t like this company is just the blatant rudeness,” Autumn, a staff member at ECO Café who provided only her first name, said. “I’ve seen managers scream at employees already over just simple things.”

Parkhurst Resident District Manager Christine Blaha, who has more than 14 years of experience in dining services, said that there is a healthy, “familial” relationship between the management and dining staff.

More than a dozen dining employees interviewed by The Lafayette disagree.

“They’re not even nice,” a Marquis cashier said of Parkhurst management. “I don’t see them making any adjustments … I’m just really thoroughly disgusted.”

“My chef has barely talked to me since I gave him my two weeks’ notice,” Davis said. “I told him I was leaving. And he said, ‘Okay,’ and closed his office door. My sous chef said he was quitting. [The chef] said, ‘Oh, that sucks.’ And he walked away. It’s a general lack of care.”

Blaha said that she was “not aware of any employees that have left on bad terms.”

Additionally, several dining employees witnessed a Parkhurst executive chef yelling at a student with celiac disease when she approached him about her dietary restrictions. This student, Rebekah Lazar ‘26, described the exchange as “very aggressive and very dehumanizing.”

“I basically left crying, like, near a panic attack, because I was just so stressed out for not being taken care of,” Lazar said. “I’d call it verbally assaulted.”

Dining management told Lazar that it could not guarantee the accommodations she requires. Employees have cited the lack of accommodations for students when describing their issues with Parkhurst Dining.

“It’s obvious that Parkhurst does not care about our time, it does not care about our money and it mostly doesn’t care about the students … they took all the love out of it,” an anonymous employee from ECO Café said. 

Several dining employees said that they are frustrated by a lack of breaks or accommodations.

“Our breaks? No breaks. Lunch, that’s it,” the Marquis cashier said. Several other employees have complained that they have not received 10-minute breaks, with Upper Farinon employees reporting that on a couple of busy days, there were no breaks at all.

“We do have a slightly different break policy, but every employee is given a lunch break, free food and beverage,” Moyer wrote.

Blaha insisted that the company abides by the law in giving breaks to employees.

Two elderly employees said that they were expected to stand for the duration of the eight-hour work day, a work day during which they had not received a 10-minute break.

“I mean, if it’s a sandwich person … it would be difficult to have a person behind the line sitting in a chair,” Blaha said. “If someone has provided us with a doctor’s note that says they …  have a need for something, those are always honored.”

The Marquis cashier said that she worked without a chair at the register for at least two weeks despite bringing a doctor’s note.

“I brought a doctor’s excuse …  and [management] said, ‘Bring your own chair,’” she said. “I said, ‘That’s not my responsibility.’”

Last week, the cashier was provided with a chair.

“You know how it was with [Bon Appétit], they were so friendly,” the cashier said. “They’d bend over backward to help you. Such a big change. Maybe it’s time for me to retire.”

An Upper Farinon employee added that, since Parkhurst took over, cushioned slip-resistant mats were removed from the kitchen that used to make standing more comfortable. Additionally, he reported that ventilation in the dining halls has led to unbearable heat.

“During the beginning of the school year, the AC broke a few times. And it was really hard to work,” the Upper Farinon employee said. “When we were closing, I ended up passing out twice because of how hot and humid it was during the night.”

According to Labe, the administration is unable to comment on specific employee health matters.

“It’s not something that Parkhurst really has control of, but they could assist. They really could,” the Upper Farinon employee said. “I didn’t notice anyone trying to solve it.”

Marquis employees have complained of extreme heat in the kitchen. Blaha, Labe and Shelley Canonico, a Parkhurst district manager, did not comment on the existence of air conditioning systems in the dining halls.

Employees have also expressed frustration with a lack of training and direction from Parkhurst.

“We did our training from what we learned from the previous employer, Bon Appétit,” John Shandor, who works the grill at Upper Farinon, said. 

Blaha said that employees received adequate training during a “week-long meeting” at the beginning of the semester.

Shandor mentioned that one day no one was scheduled to work the deli station in Upper Farinon, so he worked both the grill and the deli during his shift.

“We are family focused and … who we work with becomes our family because we’re here more than we are with our actual blood relatives,” Blaha said when asked about allegations of employees doing multiple jobs. “So, you know, we want to be able to help these other people out and we all rely on each other.”

“This is integral to their growth,” Canonico said. “And sometimes when you cross-train, you find out that you’re awesome on pizza. You find out skills that they’ve been hiding that they haven’t had a chance to show.”

Lafayette is not the first school to see pushback against Parkhurst. Duquesne University in Pittsburgh saw employees walk out last year over labor conditions while Taylor University in Indiana, according to its student newspaper, fired the company just a year into its contract due to repeated, “basic mistakes.”

Labe said that Lafayette would investigate all allegations of wrongdoing raised against Parkhurst.

“This is a partnership between the college and Parkhurst so, one hundred percent, we take those allegations extremely seriously,” Labe said. “If anybody were to come up to me and say ‘X, Y or Z is happening in the kitchen,’ we as the college would take that seriously.”

Parkhurst has a proprietary “hotline” for employees to voice their concerns to upper management, a hotline that Labe said has gone unused. Dining administrators have denied hearing of most concerns leveled by employees.

Andreas Pelekis ’26 contributed reporting.