A Mediterranean Counter for the Union: SAJJ Arrives at Tresidder, and the Price of Lunch on the Farm

Campus food courts are rarely where a university reveals itself, and yet they keep an honest record of its appetites. The counters at Tresidder Memorial Union have turned over for decades, each tenant a small verdict on what students want to eat between a seminar and a section. This fall the verdict changed again. The counter that Round Table Pizza had held since 2024 now belongs to SAJJ Mediterranean, a Bay Area fast-casual chain that builds bowls, wraps and salads to order, and the first considered judgment from the student press arrived last week.

In an Oct. 21 review in The Stanford Daily, Micah Chung found much to admire in the food and rather less to admire in the bill. The headline put the trade-off plainly: great Mediterranean fare, but at a high price. It is a tension worth sitting with, because it is the tension of eating on the Farm in general.

A Food Truck Comes Indoors

SAJJ is not a stranger to the Peninsula. Founder and chief executive Zaid Ayoub opened the first SAJJ in 2012, according to Patch, and the company has since spread across the region, with locations in San Mateo, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San Jose, along with a third San Francisco restaurant on Stevenson Street. The company’s own account of itself traces its roots to Silicon Valley and to a food truck, a lineage that still shows in the format: protein, base, spreads, sauces and toppings, assembled in front of the customer.

The Stanford counter is something new for the brand. SAJJ described it to Patch as its first “non-traditional” restaurant, meaning a location set inside an institution rather than on a street, and said it intends to pursue more of them. “The Bay Area is home for SAJJ, and we believe there is still tremendous opportunity to grow here,” Ayoub told the outlet. For a company weighing a franchise strategy beyond California, a student union is a useful proving ground: a captive, discerning and famously opinionated clientele that eats on a schedule.

What Is on the Counter

The menu, as SAJJ publishes it, is built for the customizing temperament. Falafel and shawarma anchor the proteins; bowls, wraps and salads are the vessels. The company says its proteins are halal certified and that its produce is locally sourced, and it names its growers with some pride, among them County Line Harvest in Petaluma for lettuces and arugula and Giusti Farms in Half Moon Bay, a family operation the company dates to 1902, for artichokes and chard. That last detail suits the setting. A union on the Peninsula serving greens grown over the hill on the coast is a modest, pleasing kind of geography.

Chung’s review offers the fullest public account of how the food lands. The meat, he wrote, was well spiced and of high quality, “outpacing Stanford’s strip steak by a mile.” The hummus was the revelation, smooth and savory enough to convert a self-described skeptic, and he called it “the star player.” The tzatziki struck him as too bitter, and the kebab special, he reported, was barely distinguishable from the beef. He found the portion generous, warned the spice-shy away from the cherry peppers, and noted that onions are reportedly the most popular topping. The service, by his account, was exemplary, down to samples offered at the counter and a bag produced unasked for a student with full arms.

The Price of Lunch on the Farm

Then came the number. Chung reported leaving about $20 lighter for a bowl and a can of soda, and argued that the meal, good as it was, did not justify straying from the dining plan. He pointed a few steps away to the Axe and Palm, where a hearty burger runs nearly half the price, and to CoHo, the union’s coffee house, as better value.

It is a fair complaint and an old one. Stanford’s campus has always asked students to reconcile an excellent standard of living with the arithmetic of a student budget, and the food court is where that reconciliation happens daily, in small sums. A $20 lunch is unremarkable in downtown Palo Alto or on a San Francisco office block, where SAJJ’s other counters operate. Inside a student union it reads differently, because the comparison is not with other restaurants but with the meal already paid for in a dining hall a short walk away.

A Union Named for a Hotelier

There is a quiet irony in the setting. Tresidder Memorial Union, dedicated in 1962, is named for Donald Tresidder, Stanford’s fourth president, who led the university from 1943 until his death in 1948. Before that, he was president of the Yosemite Park and Curry Company, and in that role he oversaw the building of the Ahwahnee Hotel, opened in 1927 and now a National Historic Landmark. The man whose name hangs over the building understood hospitality as a craft, and understood too that a good table is a matter of setting as much as of food.

The union still trades on setting. Stanford describes it as a hub of campus life, with dining options and patio seating on both sides of the building and White Plaza at its door. The arcade that runs past CoHo and the Treehouse, with its gazebo tables under the trees, remains one of the more agreeable places on campus to eat outdoors in an autumn that, on the Peninsula, rarely bothers to turn cold.

The Particulars

SAJJ Mediterranean is at Tresidder Memorial Union, 459 Lagunita Drive. According to The Stanford Daily, it serves Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., a lunch-only window that rewards planning. Expect a build-your-own bowl, wrap or salad, with falafel and shawarma among the proteins and hummus the dish most worth ordering by the one published review. Budget roughly $20 for a bowl and a drink, by the Daily’s account, and consider the patio. Weekend diners, for now, will need to look elsewhere on campus.

Photo: Suiren2022 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0