Cast iron soup station

Last week my mother and I joined my sister for lunch at the Virginia Theological Seminary, where she's an employee. Dining facilities at the school are called The Refectory and are operated by Meriwether-Godsey, an employee-owned company that specializes in premier dining services. Meals for students, staff and visitors are prepared under the leadership of dining services manager Benjamin Judd.

The layout of service stations impressed me the most about the operation. Set up in the main dining hall, four primary stations allowed diners to freely move about as they selected their meal. Each station included a large buffet stand with a wood framed sneeze shield. Ornate chaffing dishes held the hot food on the meat and vegetarian stations. The salad bar and build-your-own sandwich station each contained an ice well with plenty of space for square and round ingredient containers.

The soup station caught my eye as I walked past it. Looking back I should've taken more than one cell phone picture. Unfortunately, I couldn't locate any photos of The Refectory in the Internet.

The picture shows the layout of the soup pots, cups and bowls. The station was located on the inside end cap to the sandwich station. As I think about the layout, locating soup and sandwiches adjacent to each other makes sense. Two Lodge two cast iron Dutch ovens -- each placed over a heat source -- held the soup, vegetable (vegetarian, I believe) on the left with cream of cauliflower to the right.



Two cast iron Lodge Dutch ovens make up the soup station at Virginia Theological Seminary. They appear to be Lodge Model L8DOL3 Dutch ovens with loop handles.