Cooking hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of good meals on a budget is a challenge that few kitchens seem to master. The spectrum is surprisingly wide. Some fail utterly while others produce decent fare on a comparable scale and budget. Hospital food and university cafeterias in Germany are pretty comparable in that each have similar budgets per person.

The worst offender that I encountered was a kitchen that only had a very limited set of standard dishes and they still predictable failed to prepare them in exactly the same way each time. Some meals were charred black when they were supposed to be lightly fried, the pizzas had an inedible crust hard as concrete, and so on. And that went on for years...

I also wonder how long the increase in quality in Havelhöhe can last before some beancounter sweeps in and turns the system on its head again based on some pretext. I hope that this never happens, but reality has a way of throwing a wrench into the works every time.