Miina McCown/The Broadside 

If students, staff or anyone else is near the Central Oregon Community College Bend campus and wants a bite to eat, they’re in luck. The fine-dining student-run restaurant, Elevation is pleased to announce that it is open for takeout lunch orders on Friday, January 15^th through March 12^th of this year, service stopping on the week before finals. 

The establishment will be open in the Shirley Ray Food Truck at 2555 NW Campus Village Way at the Cascade Culinary Institute. Customers can pick up and pay for their orders at the food truck, with face covering required. Inside seating is not available due to COVID-19 restaurant protocols, and the interior areas of the Culinary Building are currently closed to the public.

To order, call Elevation at 541-318-3735 on Fridays between the hours of 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. All orders must be taken over the phone, and customers are given a time slot of when their food will be ready. Unfortunately, Elevation cannot accept orders prior to the specified ordering time. Due to COVID-19 as well as small class sizes and the start of the term, service will currently be limited to the first ten phone calls. Customers can pay through cash, Visa, MasterCard and Discover.

Some of the menu items include Roasted Mushroom and Wild Rice Soup, the Chicago Beef Sandwich and Adobo Fried Chicken. View the full lunch takeout menu here.

Chef Wayne Yeatman, the Associate Professor of Culinary Arts states that Elevation’s menu changes every term, challenging student chefs and being altered to fit the curriculum and the situation. The instructor of the class for this term created a menu that would work best for takeout, considering how well items have sold in the past and how well they serve on the go.

As for plans for the next term, Yeatman adds that Elevation would like to open for lunch on Mondays and Tuesdays and for dinner on Thursdays and Fridays. 

Elevation is also looking to propose that they are allowed to do limited indoor seating and outdoors on the patio in the spring term. “We try to align with what the restaurant industry is doing as a whole and that’s what we’re doing in Deschutes County, so we’d like to mimic that,” he says.

“And it’s not really the first ten people, it’s ten phone calls. And that’s kind of a misnomer because you can get ten phone calls as ten singles, or you could get one phone call for twenty people. We’re trying to do about forty or so meals for service, so that could be three phone calls or ten phone calls; it’s hard to tell.”