I attended the temple during the 1990s. I felt disillusioned about the whole experience. Apparently, the highlight of the doing a (endowment) session was eating in the temple cafeteria. I think they offered soups and sandwiches. It was the soup that was the alleged "rave" at the time. I think it was a milk-based cream type. Either cream of corn or cream of potato. I can't remember now, but it seemed like a lot of money for a rinky-dink sized bowl of Campbell's soup for seven or eight dollars. I also resented how they nickle and dimed you if you wanted extra crackers. I seem to recall that it came with a single pack of Saltines and another pack of two crackers was another buck.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/07/2018 04:00PM by messygoop.

I can't say for certain, never having eaten any temple cafeteria food.

Still, I can't imagine it being "really good."
I'm having a hard time imagining it as anything other than "barely edible."

But maybe that's just me...:)

Temple food is divine, by definition.

Just like the church.

Never got to taste it. Some long haired bearded hippy wearing sandals and a robe appeared out of nowhere with a knotted rope, beat the cashier, threw all the tables over and basically raised hell shouting something about His Father's house. The temple president rushed in, held his arm to the square and tried to order Satan to depart, but that president's skin color changed to black and he has never been seen again. Rumor has it his wife divorced him because he was no longer white and delightsome.


Well, not really but this tale is just as believable as that tale from a hat known as the Book of Mormon. I never tried the cafeteria food so I don't know if it was good or not.

Love it!

I tried it. It was like Bob Evans.

as I recall it was cheap, like $5.00 or less and they served whipped potato and lots of meat and gravy with a roll, It was English food, Southern. Very traditional. The only spice was salt and pepper, nothing Texmex or Sweet and Sour lol!

Whipped potatoes, what didthe potatoes do wrong?

In the Santa Monica temple it was. On Friday nights they served Prime Rib.

Of course, that was ages ago.
We stopped going altogether when our anal-retentive stake president suggested that couples don't go to the temple as "date night" but take it more seriously.

Leave it to Mormonism to ruin anything halfways enjoyable.

Elyse Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Leave it to Mormonism to ruin anything halfways
> enjoyable.

Right? Nelson will conquer all fun that wasn't conquered by his predecessors.

It always amuses me when I hear of couples going to the temple for date night. Why would you go for a date to a place where you aren't allowed to sit together? Lol

Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Like foreplay. You can see her across the isle with her veil covering her face...

Good point about temple date night being a poor excuse for spending time together as a couple. I went on two of those. One was with two older couples and another was with church friends. Both times, I found myself separated; even in the car. The men rode in front, and the women rode in the back.

I think it should have been called divorce date. The trip to the temple brought out the worst in people. The newlywed couple (I was a newlywed couple too) got into several fights that ended in an eerie car ride of silence. Since I wasn't enjoying anything about the temple experience, it seemed to be a proper ending to a terrible evening.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/08/2018 01:56PM by messygoop.

Absinthe Makes The Frond Grow Harder

Back in the 80's and early 90's the food was very good in the Wash DC Temple(at least when I was there. They sold big oatmeal raisin cookies. Then I ate there again later and the food was awful.

I also remember the DC temple having a "chow mein" menu item that was pretty good.

Anything to get the throat-slashing, disembowelment, five points of fellowship and pay lay ale experiences out of my mind...

Yes, the big cookies were the highlight of lunch in the DC temple for me in the early 80s too.

That's the only temple I ever ate in. I thought the price of lunch was quite reasonable then. It was cheaper than lunch in a government employee cafeteria. The food was good for the price. I remember potatoes and gravy and some kind of bland meat...Salisbury steak maybe? But the big cookie was awesome.

I remember the food in the D.C. temple being pretty good. This was back in the late 70s and early 80s and I don't think that I ate at any temples after that time period.

Small cafeterias can be hit or miss depending on their funding situation and who's in charge of setting the menu and cooking the food.

Does anyone else remember the weird "clock" in the D.C. temple cafeteria's seating area? It would show how much time was left for each running session. It was clearly homemade, cobbled together by some electronics tinkerer.

CZ

I don't remember that clock but it sounds very interesting! I think I only ate in there one time.

I baptised dead people at DC (Doctor [N.] Convenience) around then. No food remembered. It must have been the great cost of the trip (ruining any vacation), after tithing, and TT brakes.

I just remember the bull ____

Those that I attended, yes they were very good. Back in the 80's early90's

Late 90s-early 00s: it was like any cafeteria food--decent, nothing spectacular. Same with the MTC, which uses (or used) BYU food service--nothing offensive, but nothing standout.

Anziano Young Wrote:
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> Late 90s-early 00s: it was like any cafeteria
> food--decent, nothing spectacular. Same with the
> MTC, which uses (or used) BYU food
> service--nothing offensive, but nothing standout.

I put on 10 pounds during my 3 months at the MTC.
Not because the food was good, but because it was all starch and calories, and I spent all day sitting in a classroom memorizing nonsense to be later regurgitated to investigators...I should have regurgitated the food instead!

Some of the missionaries I've known have raved about how great the chocolate milk served at the MTC is, although a couple of them said that drinking it gave them "gastric problems."

Weird. I would think chocolate milk is chocolate milk, unless it was past its "sell by" date.

We used to make fun of the fact that the church used cheap knock-off cereals; instead of Lucky Charms, the MTC cafeteria had Malt-O-Meal "Marshmallow Mateys" and things like that, so we'd go in to breakfast talking like pirates, "Aargh, where be me Marshmallow Mateys?" Did the cost difference matter? To some bean-counter in Salt Lake, probably. Maybe the same person who thought that an extra pack of saltine crackers should cost 35 cents in the temple cafeteria when restaurants give that stuff away for free.

OMG, that brought back some odd memories...!

What was the Cocoa Puffs cheap replacement...Coco Roos? Something like that!

Don't be dissing on Marshmallow Mateys and Cocoa Roos just because they happened to be served at the "lord's" university. I actually prefer Malt O Meal over name brand generally.

I don't know about temple food but the food at the COB cafeteria was pretty good.

I have to admit that the cafeteria was always the highlight of any trip to the temple.

The cafeteria food wasn't spectacular. But if you were reasonably hungry, it was reasonably satisfying.

After a couple of hours of having some guy rubbing olive oil on your groin area under a poncho, wearing a cheesy polyester jumpsuit, shower cap, green apron and frilly sash, while pantomiming your own execution by throat slashing and disembowelment, followed by learning handshakes that would be necessary to enter into heaven...and then standing around in a circle with a bunch of people in the same ridiculous costumes chanting like freaks from a Stephen King horror movie...and then moving on to hug an old guy through a gauzy curtain.... you know...after that...

....after that...the cafeteria felt like you were reentering the realm of sanity and normalcy. The food was comforting. People looked normal and mentally stable. So, yeah, the cafeteria was a good way to transition back to something approximating a mentally healthy state.

The only time I ate at the temple was at the Idaho Falls temple, while I was in college. For starving students, anything tastes better than your own underdeveloped cooking.

When I would stare into my bowl characters would appear one at a time...

On second thought, maybe it was just the alphabet soup...



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/09/2018 06:05AM by Lowpriest.

I only ate at a temple cafeteria once. Had roast beef which was pretty good. I think why people rave about temple food is it's cheap. The probably are selling it at cost.

It's as good as some military base cafeteria.

I always wanted to try it. I never did--in all those 4 or 5 times I attended the temple.

I don't even remember what I ate at the Atlanta temple (my first.) I don't remember the food being spectacularly awful; I think it was a cafeteria-style affair and you could choose from among a number of things. I'm assuming that if I don't recall it as spectacularly horrible, it must have been OK.

I don't think they even have a cafeteria at the McTemple here in NM. It only serves a fairly small area, so you can eat at home or go to a local eatery.

In the Swiss temple, they really pushed their 5 franc meal chit. But the food was awful--horrible, in fact, typical of what one might expect if Swiss are in charge of food.

back when the seattle temple was still kind of new they used to put out a big salad bar.

The membership was very happy with the cafeteria. They would rave about the prime rib on fridays. I seem to remember that they would do prime rib for $7.99 (early 80's) or so which would amount to probably close to 16 bux or so today.

I liked the different choices that you could make. As kids we loved it because our ward would pay for dinner for us after "baptisms for the dead" night.

My only experience was after my sole dead dunking debacle at Cardston...and the bran muffins were bitchin'!

I remember eating at the Seattle temple cafeteria in the late 80s after doing youth baptisms. It seemed wonderful back then. It was the highlight of those trips.

About a decade later when I would go back to do endowments, the food didn't seem anywhere near as good as I'd remembered it.

And I've wondered ever since if the quality of the food went down or if I simply remembered it as better than it actually was. It may be some of both. Maybe it's like the Hard Rock cafe - in the 80s it was the place to go. Later on, as the novelty wore off, people stopped paying for their overpriced food, they cut costs, the quality went down more, and it just became a downward spiral into bankruptcy.

The temples won't go bankrupt, but I do believe that with everything, the church has cut costs and leaned more and more on the members to do the work for free - have members donate labor, "calling" missionaries to do tasks that used to involve paid labor. Yeah, I'm pretty sure the quality really did go down.

I'd do dead dunkings at Manti. The other youth absolutely LOVED the food. It was okay. I'm pretty basic in my spices and I found it bland. I never understood why my "friends" loved it so much. Even my siblings loved it. I never understood it. It wasn't bad, but nothing to write home about.

You have to imagine what they ate at home, if you can.

Then you must imagine they probably didn't want to/ couldn't write [home]. Those who loved it did so because it was Mormon. Tell them it was Baptist, or Catholic, or Methodist, and see how they liked it. Perception is a part of it, without a doubt.

Considering siblings that I lived and shared most of my meals with loved it, I don't have to imagine what they ate at home. 5 siblings who acted like it was the best food ever. I don't get it.

I've not eaten the temple cafeteria food. I did a dead dunking as a 12 or 13 year old, and went through the temple when my parents did when I was six years old. We didn't eat following the baptism rituals at the temple.

When I was six, my siblings and I stayed in the nursery all day long until it was time to go to the sealing room. What a long day that was. It didn't seem too dreary because where we were staying was light and bright, quite unlike the dark sealing room where we eventually went to get sealed to my parents.

But the lunch was very good for us children. It was navy or lima bean soup. To this day I remember how delicious and tasty it was. I don't think I'd had that soup before then, and it really hit the spot. If not for the otherwise very long day waiting, waiting, and more waiting for my parents endowment session to be over. That was one of the best parts of the temple trip, was having that lunch while we waited.

Please pass the pepper, and salt peter.

OooO

Somehow I don't equate temple cafeteria food with infertility, lolol.

Back in the 1990's, the Provo Temple Cafeteria had great food. I especially loved their breakfast. Sometimes before work, I'd do to their 5:30 am endowment session and I'd have a big breakfast after. During this time, I did a lot of family history so there were always lots of family names to do temple ordinances for.