Camp Pendleton 14 Area Chow Hall

The hours are bad on the weekends. The idea of a brunch where you eat either breakfast or lunch is nice, but it needs to be open earlier and close later, since it feels like they are trying to save man hours by combining the two masks instead of separating them. Good idea, but is usually very inconvenient when I do things on the weekend, because it isn’t open when I wake up.
It’s fairly disorganized inside, there is no logic to the way everything is set up. The silverware is a hassle especially during the long lunch lines, everyone is reaching over each other. The set up of entrée, salad bar, drinks, and snack bar isn’t fluid, which leads to needing to walk further back and forth instead of following a logical progression. At the main line, they put a large glass window separating you and the person handing you your plate of food, for some inexplicable reason. The list goes on of small inconveniences like this that shows very poor planning and very little thoughtfulness being put into the whole process.
The food is very poor quality, and the company that runs the place, Sodexo, seems to be the proto typical, «lowest bidder/​lowest quality service» government contract-​winner. At my last base, an airforce base, the food was actually good quality, but then when the time came for contract renewal, Sodexo came in and replaced the old food service company, and the quality in food dropped precipitously. They tell young enlisteds not to get married, but don’t give them the option of opting out of paying for a meal card, forcing reliance on a bottom barrel-​quality cafeteria that would cause outrage if it were found in a college campus.
The best meal is breakfast, mostly due to a regularity in menu, and how hard it is to mess up eggs and bacon, and during the week they offer breakfast burritos, although I am almost always at work, since they only offer them after the workday starts, for some bizarre reason. Offer them alongside everything else, and that alone could bump up my review a star. The best part of lunch is the sandwich line, which is decently flexible. But almost all of the daily main entrees are very low quality. Meat is overcooked and generally looks quite gross. Veggies are usually rubbery. For some reason, there is usually a large variety of «salads» like potato, ham, weird fruit salad, but very little of the basics, like a good selection of fresh fruit, though there is usually canned fruit, or melon that tastes like it had been sprayed with a preservative to keep it fresh overnight, it basically ruins the flavor.
Moreover, there seems to be a strong presence of management, or at least seems to be a few people standing around with clipboards most of the time, and I assume either they are totally incompetent to see how poorly they are doing their jobs (I assume they bring their food from home, because I don’t think they have tasted the food they are serving), or maybe it’s the corporate-​level incompetence which trickles down.
The DFAC here makes it very hard to choose their food over eating out. Which is a testament to its quality, considering that it is, effectively, free food.

For the price this is an excellent place to dine. On Camp Pendleton you can do no worse to eat here. Salad bar, Sandwich bar, fast food, and an awesome selection of drinks to include milk!