Between 7:30 each morning and eight at night, Princeton students flood the campus’s seven dining halls. Whether grabbing a pastry on the way to an early morning lecture, enjoying well-deserved cookies with their closest friends, or simply taking a quiet moment to recharge with a slice of cake, students consume around 6,000 desserts daily. While this big number may lead to assumptions that these desserts are mass imported by a faraway dessert company, this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Hidden below the Rockefeller-Mathey dining hall lies a magical workshop of sweets called the RoMA bakery. Within this bakeshop, 100% of the residential college menus and around 90% of campus’s retail menus are made from scratch daily and shipped to residential dining halls and special events.
Powered by a tight-knit group of five bakers and two delivery people, the RoMa bakery is much akin to Princeton’s Area 51, except instead of possible aliens, it possesses a much more dangerous secret: over 60-year-old chocolate chip cookie recipes.
Marked only by an 8x11 inch piece of paper taped to a pipe above the basement entrance that reads “BAKESHOP,” the RoMa bakeshop is at first unassuming: a medium-sized room perpetually buzzing with the sounds of baking machinery and filled with heavenly smells of cookie dough and freshly baked brownies. The room has a large central wooden table, where bakers pour sheets of brownies, and baking machinery large enough to hold stacks of baked goods the height of an NBA player line the room’s perimeter. Except for a small test table in a corner, everything within the bakeshop feels massive compared to our kitchens at home.
The grand size of everything makes sense when considering the bakery’s immense production. The shop uses roughly 150 pounds of King Arthur flour each shift. The flour arrives in sealed bags that seem more appropriate for a Home Depot.
While most of the bakery’s machinery is remarkably vintage, with countless 50-year-old mixers, one clear exception is the bakery’s cookie machine. Purchased in 2023, the machine can make around 130 dozen cookies and store information on over 1,000 recipes.
Thanks to the machine, Executive Pastry Chef Michael DiLiberto shared in an interview with The Daily Princetonian, “Usually when we do a batch of cookies, it’s around 120 dozen, 130 dozen.”
To work it, a baker loads over 200 pounds of cookie dough into a large funnel on top, electronically sets the machine for the desired type of cookie, and then loads empty trays onto a conveyor belt below. Small balls are then dropped onto the pan under a giant metal vat of dough, which the machine spits out on the other end.
The bakers also use a dough shooter and two large, old mixers. Indeed, while the bakery’s new cookie machine represents an investment in increased productivity, this type of equipment change is rare.
“There’s not many moving parts on the inside,” DiLiberto said, referring to the over 50-year-old mixer. “If you fix them the right way, they will last a hundred years or so,” There is value in using the same old equipment “because it works,” he asserted.
However, beyond the bakery’s robust machinery and resources, the most impressive aspect of the RoMa Bake Shop is its people.
While Princeton students may grumble about getting out of bed for their 10 a.m., the five-person baking team, led by Executive Pastry Chef Michael DiLiberto, typically arrives every morning at 3 a.m., finishing their shifts around noon.
The bakery’s early hours and high-pressure environment could create a challenging work environment. Yet, the team is incredibly supportive of one another, with DiLiberto referring to the team as a ‘family.’ “The kitchen culture is a tight community. You have each other’s back because there’s no other way to get this type of production done. It’s something that keeps guys like us and women in the business for so long,” Gattis said.
Given the limited time and the massive volume of food required, the bakers are in a constant race against the clock. As Culinary Associate Director Michael Gattis puts it, “Dinner is at five. Lunch is at 11:30. There is no not getting [it] out on time.” In the end, their ability to consistently assemble quality goods all comes down to experience.
The high-quality result of the bakers’ work is a combination of science and instinct, balancing quality and quantity with experience. This experience is essential for many of the bakery’s 50-year-old and older recipes that often contain only a list of ingredients. The bakers simply have to know the method for mixing the dough and how to bake it.
The bakers also internalize the scientific nature of baking, adjusting their process as they bake to account for humidity and ingredient substitutions. Further, during Princeton’s summer downtime, the bakeshop experiments with new recipes and ingredients and modifies recipes for scale and new machinery.
“They’re tried, they’re tested, they’re approved, and then they go into our database,” Gattis explained.
While many of the bakeshop’s recipes rely on tried-and-tested methods, there is still room for innovation. For example, for Women’s History Month this year, the team pioneered baker Kayla Burg’s Chocolate Dirt Pudding recipe, one of her family’s favorite recipes, inspired by the time she spent helping her parents in their garden growing up. As they do with all family recipes, the bake shop worked with Kayla to preserve the integrity of her family recipe, while adapting to serve the whole campus, balancing family tradition with innovation.
In many ways, the bakeshop is a direct continuation of the ideals Princeton represents, blending tradition, innovation, and community. This message remained constant throughout the tour, perfectly embodied by Gattis’s comment, “Part of the scratch cooking is the campus dining’s initiative to move away from processed foods … for the health and wellness of our students. There’s a cost involved with it, but … it’s the right thing to do … it’s the Princeton Way.”
Learning from the bakers at RoMa Bakery revealed one of Princeton’s largest not-so-hidden secrets and demonstrated how the “Princeton way” applies to far more than just academics. As each of RoMa’s bakers demonstrates day in and day out, the Princeton Way is about challenging yourself, working for others, and educating yourself about the past to better the future. Therefore, the next time you grab a perfectly golden brown danish on a rush across campus, take a moment to appreciate the “heart and soul” that goes into it. As Gattis expressed, “Every bite that you take … you take a piece of [the staff] with you. And that’s what food is all about.”
Gavin McLoughlin, a member of the class of 2028, is an associate editor for The Prospect. He can be reached at gm9041@princeton.edu.
Annika Plunkett is a staff writer for The Prospect and a member of the Newsletter team. She can be reached at ap3616@princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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