As students walk through the avenues of dining halls, deciding what meal to scarf down before an afternoon lecture, they rarely think about where the food is coming from or how it got here. They often don’t think about which farms grew the vegetables, what cows provided the dairy or what processed transformed ingredients into meals.
While students don’t always keep this behind-the-scenes work in mind, it’s all executive chef Paul Sprunger thinks about.
As of January, Sprunger is the master and commander of dining for University Housing. He runs day-to-day operations at every dining facility within the Housing department, like creating menus for regular dining hours as well as catering events, finding new products and companies to bring in, monitoring food trends and fads to bring new dishes to the dining halls and troubleshooting any challenge thrown his way.
Sprunger said his biggest challenge is competing with the flourishing food culture of downtown Madison. With a city so in love with food, Sprunger said he constantly mixes up the menu to provide an equally as exciting dining experience for UW-Madison students as anywhere on State Street.
Even though he is presented with challenges when he steps into the kitchen, Sprunger said he still appreciates everything about his position.
“My favorite part is interacting with the students and staff, even though I don’t get to do it that often,” Sprunger said.
He added that collaboration is definitely a cardinal task for his position. From larger food distributing companies to local Amish farmers, Sprunger said he gets to work with a plethora of interesting business partners.
Apart from interacting with the people in his own work environment and the students they cook for, Sprunger also frequently networks with farmers and food distributors to get the best ingredients he can find close to home.
“We’re trying to keep things as local as possible, and by local we mean the state of Wisconsin,” Sprunger said.
On top of his kitchen duties, Sprunger also has an office in Gordon Dining and Event Center, where he tweets daily updates of what’s on the menu in the dining halls and what housing events are happening around campus.
Sprunger said his best advice for students who want to be culinary in college is to plan out meals for each week and buy groceries based on what is needed for those meals.
