Art by Kim Le, MS2
Over the torturous years of growling and groaning at the Perelman Center, both at the mule-crevice of dawn and the wee witching hours of the night, I have starved, famished, and scavenged daily like a vulture in a lab coat. Since the pandemic, as a coffee-indulging graduate student turned caffeine-dependent medical student, I’ve collected sacred, ulcer-inducing insights into how our institution feeds its young. In this Review, we shall explore some of the gluttonous snacks, saturating treats, and full-bodied, gut-disintegrating coffee options within a ten-minute walk of our beloved JMEC on the 5th floor.
One West Café (Smilow First Floor). We begin at One West Café, located on the first floor of Smilow, past the pharmacy where I, at the cusp of each Spring season, acquire heaps of Flonase to obliterate all signs of mucus in my nostrils, even at the consequential expense of Mojave-dry membranes and a morning epistaxis or two. For years, I survived on their peanut butter banana smoothie (a Nobel Peace Prize-worthy flavor combination that you must snatch from the fridge earlier than 9:30 a.m.) before dreadfully witnessing the smoothie’s viscosity plummet and its price inflate from $4.25 to a morally criminal $5.90. Around the corner, though, hides the ultimate salvation, and arguably the best coffee on our campus: the illy drips.
Folks, coffee is not a simple man’s beverage. It is a spiritual experience and awakening, a daily baptism in boiling bean broth. Before the invention of coffee, peasants roamed the septic streets, sloshed on mead as their means of survival, projectile vomiting on their unfortunate neighbors. When coffee came, the Enlightenment began (no mere coincidence); peasants became noblemen and now vomited on the town drunks from their newfound GERD.
As an important note, I drink coffee not to wake up, but to return to my baseline. Just a few hours without coffee, and I’m back in the HUP ER for my regularly scheduled hypotensive crisis. And to my fellow medical students who drink “coffee” from the 8th floor, I bear grim news. Overhead NIH cuts killed Starbucks and its froth packets, leaving only the cursed Alterra packets, essentially an assassin’s poison that delivers not caffeine but migraines so vile that attending lecture actually eases the pain. Unfortunately, I need about eight of these to regain consciousness and control of my legs to ambulate once again.
As a young boy (two years ago), I heavily consumed Blonde Roasts from the Starbucks outside of PCAM that generates half of Penn Medicine’s GDP, to the point of hearing Morse code in my palpitations. But I must admit that Starbucks has gotten the formula right. For months, I mainlined the Verdana blend and a chocolate chip cookie until one morning, I tried the notorious Pink Drink (which I mistakenly called “pinkity-dinkity” to the barista) as a substitute for caffeine and, like a biblical plague, shook so violently that signals were picked up on the local Richter scale. I began to grow distrustful of orders equal to or longer than five words, the only exception being the Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew, a relic of stability in this crumbling world.
Moreover, I firmly oppose the principle of caffeine pills. Unlike some, these pills don’t come with the fully sensory triad of aroma, heat, and color. The closest substitute is Trader Joe’s chocolate-covered espresso beans or, for the overall effect, a Hazy IPA. Caffeine in other forms, like Celsius or Double Shot Espressos, has already reduced my life expectancy in half.
Finally, on Thursdays, the One West Café pays homage to our Latin American brothers and sisters with the Taco Bar, one that initially excites patients and staff from all walks of life, then slaps them harder than Will Smith at the Oscars with disappointment when they observe that the weight of two scoops of rice will cost them their month’s rent and their left kidney.
Gia Pronto. If we return to the atrium of PCAM, we find the Gia Pronto concession stand, with a line in the morning that surpasses the clog on I-76W when you are desperately trying to leave the city. Here, I never refuse the opportunity for a Dirty Chai, essentially the most resembling beverage of a daytime cocktail for the clinically employed. Downstairs in the main Gia Pronto restaurant, upon entering through the same doors we would use to avoid the security guards during the pandemic, we can find the famous $3 pizza slices, which have, remarkably, received the standard PCAM Italians’ stamp of approval.
Importantly, as a public service announcement, “Gia” is pronounced “Ja,” just like the name “Chiara” is “Kiara,” and not “Chaara.” Folks, disrespecting Italian phonetics is a moral crime. In fact, there are many very important cardinal sins to avoid when it comes to respecting Italian culture. Never must you raise a glass of water to someone making a toast. Never must you purchase the Mexican cheese blend from Target. Never must you say that Fettuccini Alfredo and Espresso Martinis are Italian-derived. And above all, never ever lay hands on a man’s spaghetti.
Italians think and breathe pasta. Years ago, an Italian post-doc gave me a two-hour lecture on how different pasta shapes serve different functions (i.e., you can subdivide pastas by length, the presence of striations, and the diameter of the hole). Each pasta can be paired with a unique cheese (quite frankly, it’s just theme and variations of Parmesan), and for some reason, the cheese to rule them all is Pecorino. In fact, basic Italian food is not difficult to make; after having witnessed my own Italian PI consume just rice and olive oil as a full lunch meal, I had to send him an email reminder that the planes are no longer overhead.
The Pavilion Café. Moving across the west PCAM bridge, we enter the Pavilion Café, where you might encounter a few organizations tabling their fresh pastries, but in reality, you are craving the famous chicken tenders, incubating under a headlamp like mice being prepared for tail vein injections, that every student, including the vegetarians, knows about. Here, I have tried time and time again to recreate Nashville Hot Honey Chicken by taking these tenders and the deeply upsetting Heinz honey packets stashed around the corner. I have, indeed, cried in utter disappointment every time. For the love of condiments, stick to making ketchup.
At the Café, there are two delicacies: the Asian bowls at the far end, and, of equal importance, the cranberry chicken sandwiches that spike your hormones faster than a $301 fine from the Philadelphia Parking Authority (i.e., PPA, a modern-day reenactment of Salem, MA, circa 1692) for briefly pulling over in a handicap spot. The worst part about the PPA, by far, is the dementors.
If you arrive at the Café early in the morning, for a dollar each, you can acquire pancakes, which are unfortunately a few tiers below those of Waffle House, the sacred institution of the South. To inform the folks up North, “Waho” is a premier diner that will be my shelter in the event of a nuclear fallout. A man was once shot and killed in the Northside Waho (north of Georgia Tech’s campus), and police tape was placed around it for a grand total of 16 hours before they started serving breakfast again. Besides, the Waffle House Index, one that measures the proportion of restaurants that are closed during severe weather events, is the only meteorological metric I take seriously.
Root and Sprig. Now, we enter the realm of the great equalizer — Root and Sprig, deep into the Pavilion, before the bridge to HUP, and easily missed by the untrained cherub eye. A place that had initially promised me health, vitality, and gut flora rebirth, but tore that contract to shreds within the blink of an eye.
For one brief, delusional season, I became their prophet. I (essentially) began a tumbling butterfly effect, convincing a full generation of medical students to subscribe to their $50-a-month plan for unlimited coffee. We were a movement: lattes in one hand, egg-and-cheese wraps in the other, colon lining intact. But it all changed when the Fire Nation attacked. After around a month (September 2024) of consuming multiple cappuccinos each day to the point where the overworked staff knew my order by heart, I began to feel a pain in my stomach akin to that of chronic doxycycline use in my preteen years for acne control. My gastrointestinal tract began reenacting trench warfare on the Western Front. Every organ clenched in unison like a Gregorian chant of pain. My microbiome began to collapse, essentially as if I had destroyed the diversity of my gut species by vancomycin-ing myself into oblivion. Now, when I pass Root, my colon tightens out of muscle memory. I am proud to be the current leader and spearhead of the resistance.
Bower Café. Bower is essentially the Front Street of Fishtown or the 6th Street of Austin condensed into a hipster coffee shop. One afternoon, when walking over, the shop blasted house electronic music on their wide speakers, giving me instant flashbacks to shopping at Zara, where I typically put on sunglasses and ask the cashier for a vodka-tonic. Upon turning the corner, the kind barista who took my order had tattoos covering every square inch of their neck. The experience felt as if I had just cleared security at an EDM festival, and honestly, the serotonin hit was comparable. If Root and Spring is Gandalf the Grey, Bower is Gandalf the White.
The one item you must try is their breakfast sandwich, one that should frankly be listed on the NASDAQ or at least in the Philly Inquirer’s review earlier this year,1 a problem I plan to address in a strongly worded email to the mayor of Philadelphia since they consulted the so-called Philly Food Ladies and not me, a longstanding veteran of food affairs across our city.
Jimmy John’s. Jimmy John’s is essentially ranch with a side of bread. Sadly, for the vegetarians, your only option is emotional exile, like Tom Hanks at the end of Cast Away, or me in New Jersey. Lost, deserted, and questioning your entire future.
The CHOP Cafeteria (One Ring to Rule Them All). The CHOP cafeteria is essentially Epcot’s World Showcase for the chronically sleep-deprived. The buffalo chicken tacos at the 33rd Street stand are the stairway to heaven, and the woman behind the counter knows all that glitters is gold. Immediately to its right, the Mediterranean station is the closest we can get to having a halal cart on our campus, especially when you are in a rush and cannot venture to carts near the Drexel Dragon to douse your platter in a gallon of dehydrating, hypertension-inducing white sauce.
Tyson Bee’s. Finally, veering slightly off campus, we find ourselves at the all-mighty “orange” food truck, enclosing the sweetest humans to ever walk our campus. I believe that I have personally Venmo-ed Fausto Cabrera half of my life savings, but the soaking burrito that drenches the plastic bag makes the experience divine. If they ever become a restaurant, I will demand that their special light cream-colored sauce be dispensed from a soda machine.
Closing Thoughts: A Michelin Guide for the Sleep-Deprived. If Michelin ever made a guide for medical students, PCAM would earn one star, a redeeming and impressive feat, not necessarily for flavor, but for endurance. In this crucible of hunger and hypotension, food is not just nourishment. Every sip, every bite, is a study in caffeine psychosis and gastrointestinal roulette to keep all of us, students and staff alike, churning and yearning, and hopefully at some point in the next decade, earning.
1 Sam Morris and Evan Weiss. (2025, March 20). The best breakfast sandwich in Philly bracket. The Philadelphia Inquirer. https://www.inquirer.com/food/inq2/best-breakfast-sandwich-philly-bracket-20250320.html
