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After first opening the Underground in 1995, the café served as a
popular place for students for many years. Small group entertainment was
provided on occasion and students enjoyed an option to pick up a
carry-out lunch. But by 2007 its popularity had declined to a point
where it was no longer financially viable to keep the café open. The
café remained closed for most of the 2008-09 school year.In the fall semester of 2009 the café reopens with a new emphasis on providing a relaxed “green” atmosphere where students are encouraged to bring their netbooks (faster N-type wireless connection available), study, read a magazine, watch TV, listen to music, or just stay and visit as long as you like. No time to stay? We also provide to-go service. We have worked hard to provide a quality menu of drinks and food items that are not available at other locations on campus and at affordable prices. We provide free purified water filtered through a new reverse osmosis system. We encourage you to drop in and fill a mug or fill a gallon to take back to your room. We also encourage you to purchase one of our metal water bottles. You can avoid plastic toxins, help reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions from trucking plastic bottles to campus, and reduce the quantity of plastic going to the landfills.
We have made a concerted effort to provide environmentally appropriate service. We buy products from locally grown suppliers and we sell Pura Vida coffee drinks rather than Starbucks which is served in other dining locations. Pura Vida strives to protect the environment while providing a living wage for the world’s poor. Our dishware is made of recycled materials. We use no foam containers. Our carry-out containers are made of either paper or a material that looks like plastic but is actually made from bio-degradable corn materials. We also offer for sale an inexpensive to-go container that is completely re-useable and a refillable cup made of recycled material that you can bring back and refill at a discount throughout the school year. We recycle all that we can and soon hope to provide compost service for our food waste.
Finally, we donate a portion of each sale to either The Nature Conservancy’s Adopt-an-Acre program or the World Wildlife Fund Species Adoption program. Our first efforts will be to adopt an acre on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula and support the Mexican Gray Wolf.
Our goal is to create an Underground café that is highly interactive with students. While we will create student employment opportunities on campus we also welcome student volunteers to help us with our charitable efforts, our recycling program, and maintaining our website”