Tech Express - Evanston

Good breakfast/lunch food both before and after the Compass takeover, but unreliable. On a given visit during their business hours, it's luck of the draw whether they'll have food. Tech Express has occasionally been closed without online notice. For other people working in Tech who rely on Tech Express for food, they can be as much a source of anxiety as a source of food.

I see some harsh opinions here. I do think that there is a lot of room for improvement in the quality of the food, the service, and the fairly unreasonable prices. The salads are often wilted, wraps are often soggy, even the coffee is pretty bad. But the reality is, no matter how much they suck, Tech Express will never fail as a business given their monopoly over the many hungry people in this building. I think the new Kellogg building has way better food options, but that does require walking outside for like 5 minutes, which can require a lot of courage in the winter. Having said that, I'm still giving 3 stars because I have seen Tech Express put in some effort over the last 4 years to improve itself when it could have continued just doing the very minimum of feeding students something. Up until a year or two ago, the only okay hot food consisted of hot dogs. Then they had Asian rice/noodle bowls as the hot food option for a while, which wasn't great, but a lot better than what they had before. And very recently, they did a general revamping. Now their hot food station is Indian food, including meat options like chicken biryani, chicken tikka masala, and beef stew and sides like naan and samosa. And there are Asian foods (fried rice, etc. in the refrigerated section that can be heated up. The coffee station now has fancy milk containers and cold brew. So 2 stars for the actual food, but 3 stars for effort.

Food is not very good and quite expensive, but it is quite convenient.

Food is not good and expensive

Nice place for diner food.