Fresh fruit boxes, the juice station and authentic Indian cuisine: Why you should be eating North Campus

During Global week Katherine Brasseux talked to Food Space representative, Mark Cronin about all the exciting pop-ups happening in Friars on the North Campus. Between high-quality, affordable menus, fresh, local produce and handsome burgers, Friars is making a pretty solid case for why you should be making the trip over to the Cairnes building for lunch.

“One of the philosophies we have at Foodspace is our 50 mile menu. What we try to do is source as many of the ingredients that we use in our kitchen from within 50 miles of the location of service. So we’re really looking at Galway and you’ve got so many opportunities within that.”

One of the cool companies operating in Galway that Food Space uses is The Fruit Brothers, who were running a pop-up juicing station in Friars that week.

The Fruit Brothers have a massive following on Twitter, and it’s easy to see why. They sell boxes of fruit so you can select what your choice would be for fresh fruit and they’d bring you the freshest produce they have in a box, delivered to your house. Mark noted that the amount of sugary snacks consumed on the premises went down once the fruit boxes were introduced. Proving that while healthy options aren’t always the first things people think of when they want a snack, they are first choice when made readily available.

One of Food Space’s concepts within the company, independent of The Fruit Brothers is The Juice Station. The idea which was set up is that you pick your fruits and juice them into these compostable bottles and as you close the lid it actually snaps the seal on the top of the bottle so it stays fresh inside. So when you open it the next time you break that seal like you would on a bottle that you’d buy in a regular store. This ran in Friars for about three weeks in the end of August towards the beginning of September and a lot of people were doing their juicing every morning. It was completely customizable and done yourself. It’s €3.50 for the bottle of juice which compares really well with the Fruices and stuff that you get out of the fridge.

“But the big thing is that it’s completely fresh and natural. So we’ve had people coming down, there was one lady who was using it every morning and she had four oranges, an apple and some ginger and that was her morning and she was taking that back to her desk, popping it into the fridge in her office, wherever she was and actually was really upset when we took it away!”

Clearly, the students of NUIG are crying out for more juice. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of other places are too:

“We have some other Foodspace outlets throughout the country so The Juice Station went on tour basically. We cater for all the food outlets at the Abbott facilities in Ireland, so there are seven large Abbott factories and the Juice Station went around the seven for the last few weeks.”

Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to wait for it to cycle back to us.

Food Space are very interested in the pop-up concept at the moment, with a new pop-up every month. You may remember The Handsome Burger Guys from last month which was so popular that they literally had queues out the door and down the steps. The next one we have to look forward to is a mix your own salad concept coming some time mid November, so all health nuts, vegans and uncooked vegetable enthusiasts keep an eye on Food Space’s Instagram and Twitter.

What’s coming up this week?

Starting on the 5th of November is Diwali, the Indian festival of lights. In honour of this festival Friars is working with the international students, particularly those in the Cairnes building with a sort of a focus group with them. These students met with the head chef to go over some menu ideas, sort of food ideas for the light festival. So keep an eye on Food Space’s social media for updates on the excellent cuisine on offer, especially on Wednesday the 7th.

“The win for us would be that the local Indian restaurants would partner with us, but they’re so busy that week because it’s such a big week for them that it’s proving harder than we thought to pin that down, but in fairness to the guys here, the international students, they’ve been really receptive and they’ve come in with recipe ideas and sending one their mother’s recipes for their different dishes and stuff like that. So we’re going to hope to see an influence of Indian cuisine through that week particularly.”

With so many exciting ideas and fresh concepts coming into play in Friars, it’s definitely worth going 5 minutes out of your way to see what they’ll come up with next.

Look for #EatNorthCampus on Instagram for updates on everything Food Space has to offer.

Follow Food Space on Instagram @foodspaceireland.

Follow The Fruit Brothers on Instagram @thefruitbrothers.ie.

Happy Diwali!

by Georgia Griffin.