On Tuesday, the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan University Center encountered its first lunchtime rush, a chaotic few hours marked by students catching up, sifting through mail, but most notably, waiting in long lines to grab some lunch.

“Usdan is to Wesleyan as the potato famine was to Ireland: we’re going hungry because the lines are too long,” said Carter Smith ’09.

New dining service provider Bon Appétit had managers positioned at the door of the second-floor servery admitting customers in waves. The marketplace was swarmed with students navigating their food options, who then had to wait for their food to be prepared and then stand in one of two lines (each with two cashiers) to pay and depart.

“In [Davenport], you had three different floors, and there was different food on each floor so that broke it up a little, but the lines were always a really crazy,” said Bon Appétit cashier Lori Branciforte, who formerly worked in Davenport. “It’s just now, we’re all in one place…this is the main place.”

“This line is absurd,” said Rebecca Martin ’10, who was waiting at a cashier stand behind a queue of twenty people. “I’ve been here for three or four minutes and it’s barely moved, and I have an hour in between classes. The food is good, but there’s no time to wait for food, and then in line to pay.”

University Center Director Dean Rick Culliton said he expects the lines to dissipate over the next week as people settle into their schedules.

“We know it was crowded from about 12 to one p.m. and after one o’clock, there was no one in the servery,” said Dean Rick Culliton in an Argus interview. “Bon Appétit is aware of it and is working on streamlining and making some food that will be prepared before the lunchtime rush. But it’s also true that every year, with MoCon, there was a line that wrapped around the building, and at Davenport, the same thing.”

Culliton sent out an all-campus e-mail on Wednesday addressing concerns and urging students to take advantage of Usdan’s longer lunch hours, because it is open until 3 p.m.

The lines at Usdan have caused students to turn to other venues like WesWings and Weshop for food at noon. Some, however, are so dissatisfied with the new dining arrangement that they are calling for the reopening of MoCon, the former cafeteria. Unlike MoCon, which was “all-you-can-eat” for both lunch and dinner, Usdan is à la carte for lunch, and “all-you-care-to-eat” during dinner.

That, and other reasons incited Scott Cole ’09 to form a group on popular social networking site, facebook.com, called “Bring Back Mocon.” Cole believes that bringing together most student diners in one location, as opposed to splitting them between MoCon and Davenport, has caused irreparable congestion.

He also says that although the quality of food has increased with the arrival of Bon Appétit, the quality of life has decreased.

“Anyone who ever stepped foot in MoCon would have noticed that, especially at dinner time, whole teams, societies, and groups of friends would sit together at round table which could easily accommodate at least 10-12 individuals who could all converse across the round table,” Cole said. “Now we have only 4 person round tables or long narrow rectangular tables, making it impossible to speak to anyone who is not directly next to you or on a direct diagonal.”

Cole also has a laundry list of things that Usdan lacks, amongst them: soymilk, eight flavors of ice cream that almost never ran out, grilled cheese at every meal, no waiting for pizza, at least two varieties of soup at any given time, cereal at every meal and of course, much shorter lines, even at peak hours.

According to Bon Appétit’s Resident District Manager Delmar Crim, it isn’t feasible for MoCon to be reopened.

“[Usdan] was designed to take care of students and ultimately it will to a large degree,” he said. “This seats twice as many as MoCon and when the traffic flows get figured out I think the students are going to love it. I think students just have nostalgia for [MoCon].”

Crim mentioned several solutions that Bon Appétit is considering to alleviate crowding, such as selling more grab-and-go options, setting up more stations as self-serve, and pricing more meals as by the pound.

Ultimately, though, some of Usdan’s woes might be attributed to understaffing.

“Either we need to have more staff or maybe we need to look at scheduling staff more efficiently to accommodate the peak mealtimes,” he said. “That’s the obvious fix for people, to throw more staff at the problem, but we really need to get better at what we do…and possibly augment the staff when needed. At the end of the day, it is the students’ money and we have to be wise when spending the money.”

Crim also expressed that as the week progressed, things at Usdan have been running more and more smoothly.