And when you’re done with your meal, we have no Lowerator or tastefully-hidden conveyor belt to whisk your tray away into a doldrums washroom.

In Quincy, you throw out your own napkin and toss your own silverware into a bucket o’ water to soak.

Your tray goes, in your full view, into the kitchen, where employees listen to hip-hop and throw out your uneatens and sort your plates and cups and bowls.

There’s little frill—or hiding from reality—in Quincy.

But we, here in Quincy, welcome students from all over the college to join our food lines with a friendliness that you can’t get at a lot of other dining halls—if you can even get in to those other dining halls.

Like dining halls that have instituted interhouse restrictions, we have long lines, we have food shortages and our dining hall staff are ridiculously overworked.

It can be a challenge to find two seats together.

Student groups that include more than three members not from the same House overload Quincy, holding dinner meetings in the grill area (always hot, even at dinner time).

Meanwhile kids find themselves sharing tables with people they’ve never seen before.

But there’s a friendly, inclusive spirit to no-nonsense Quincy, which is hopping these days with people from all Houses, like an upperclass Annenberg.

There has been no controversy on Quincy-Open over our dining hall, no call for stricter interhouse rules or complaints about being confronted with a sea of unknown faces.

Indeed, much of Quincy has embraced its role as the catchall dining option for the hungry, the poor, the huddled masses of Harvard students.

With table space at a high premium, those dining in Quincy might find that they don’t have that comfortable two chair buffer between groups, but taken as a Berg-like opportunity to meet someone new, that little buffer is unnecessary.

Quite literally, Quincy House is where its at (and its where all those Quadlings you havent seen since you lived in the Yard are at, too).

In one of his rare moments praising Harvard, John Reed said “All sorts of strange characters of every race and mind; poets, philosophers, cranks of every twist. No matter what you were or what you did, at Harvard you could find your kind.” He would have loved Quincy.