Ever crave some late-night munchies? Looking for a comfortable setting to chat with friends and enjoy a hot brew? If you didn’t know, Café La Verna is a hot spot to lounge in a social atmosphere, but also a place where you can focus on your schoolwork. La Verna’s biggest problem is a lack of food after 10 p.m.
Recently Café La Verna started offering chicken wings from 7 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday. For just $7.34 you get 10 wings with your choice of hot, medium, mild, gold honey mustard or barbeque sauce.
Sounds great, except just a few steps and flight of stairs away you can get the same exact thing at the Rathskeller, and not just on Monday through Thursdays. The only difference is eating your wings in a sports bar atmosphere instead of a coffee house.
Thomas Hornbuckle, a senior business administration and marketing major said he would be a more frequent La Verna customer if they provided meals late night.
“The big thing for me is if I can order to pick up, especially later at night,” Hornbuckle said. “If they had even a modified menu of, say, the one at The Clubhouse, I’d be very intrigued.”
La Verna does allow you to pre-order during their current hours.
If La Verna wants to get serious about providing hot, readily made food to students they need to offer a larger time window for those students to turn up. Closing the deli at 10, just like the Hickey, gives students extremely limited options for late night snacks.
Unfortunately for us, even food venues in most of the greater Olean area shut down at or before 10 p.m. during the week too.
Granted, La Verna does allow you to venture into their pre-made “Grab and Go Sandwiches,” after 10 p.m., but choices are limited.
Not only could La Verna improve on their food aspects, but also their atmosphere in general. The Slam Poetry Club has started to hold open mic nights in La Verna on certain Thursdays. More social events like this can only lead to a rise in student attendance and appetites.
If La Verna could even add one or two TVs, an even wider audience of students would be more inclined to come. This may diminish the “study” aspect of the café, but fortunately La Verna already features dividers to split the building between Starbucks and the deli.
By no means is La Verna failing to attract students, myself included. In fact I highly recommend their peanut butter milkshake on the coffee side. However, with a few reasonable changes and additions, the little café could be well on its way to being the hottest nighttime spot on campus.
Kyle Zamiara is an associate editor for The Bona Venture. His email is zamiarkj10@bonaventure.edu.
