The Square

Often you can – we serve smaller portions to help prevent food waste and encourage you to ask for more if you feel portions are too small. Exceptions to this are generally items that are sold by the item such as a Burger, a piece of fruit, pre-made sandwich, a Chicken Kiev etcetera or sold by weight or by container size. Our team are happy to advise you.

We definitely do! Have a look at the Clever Cuisine Nutrition page and also our Wellness Portal to see all the great things we do. Cooking from scratch gives us the ability to leave out various nasty ingredients. If after looking at our pages you feel we aren't offering anything healthy, please request a face to face meeting letting us know what you want to talk about (the more detail the better) and we’ll send the most appropriate and senior member of the team to talk to you. We are always happy to work with you to ensure you eat how you want to.

Many of the food items we sell take several hours to cook, some up to 24 hours, and as they don’t come out of a packet, this does mean we run out of certain dishes. Our team use their knowledge of what sells, and what doesn’t sell, to try to get the numbers correct but this doesn’t always work. While it is annoying when things run out, it is also a good thing we don't have packets of highly processed food in the freezer....

This is a myth. We cook our food from scratch each day from the freshest ingredients we have available to us and are reducing the number of deep fat fryers across our sites, using seasonal ingredients and avoiding processed foods, bases, pastes, preservatives etcetera. Our teams don’t like fryers as they are unpleasant to use and make you smell, so we keep frying to a minimum. Park Eat, Eat at the Square, Wantage and St. Patrick's are all working on phasing out fryers, so are focussed on oven baking items. Our Wellness Portal displays the nutritional value of the majority of items we serve.

All chicken and lamb we cook with is Halal and is slaughtered in a humane manner that is approved by the RSPCA. Beef is not currently certified as Halal as it comes from our own farm and our local butcher isn't certified Halal. Please ask the team for more information on Halal options. Park Eat, Wantage, Eat at the Square and St. Patrick's can cater for a Halal diet with a wide range of choice. At Park House and The Dairy, only vegetarian and vegan dishes are suitable for Halal diets.

Please ask to speak to a member of our team who’ll be able to help you. We cook from scratch in kitchens handling multiple allergens so there is a risk of cross-contamination so those with severe allergies should ask before eating. If you are on a Clever Cuisine Eating Plan please book a time to see our Head Chef so we can tailor our services to you. You are also welcome to ask our staff to change their gloves or wash their hands before serving you due to your allergies.

UPDATED 2 July 2020 - For the 2020/21 Academic Year all of our sites will be handling ingredients are or contain nuts as our kitchens will be co-producing for each other. This is to ease pressure caused by staff being unable to work across multiple kitchens to allow us to keep teams separate to reduce the risk of one person causing multiple staff to become ill. For example, we'll make Chocolate Cake at one kitchen for all our kitchens to use.

We love all feedback as it helps us improve our services. Please provide as much detail as possible, including where and when, as it really helps us. All our team members will give you their name if requested. Certain staff in some areas may only give you first name and initial for privacy reasons. Feel free to drop us an email clevercuisine@reading.ac.uk , or we have feedback forms on our outlet pages.