Photo by Tara Monastesse ’25.
Students from the class of 2023 were invited to return to the Cochary Pub & Kitchen on March 2.
By Tara Monastesse ’25
News Editor
After being closed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Cochary Pub & Kitchen in Blanchard Hall celebrated its reopening on the evening of March 2 with a night exclusive to members of the Class of 2023. The pub reopened to the entire student body the following night, allowing Mount Holyoke students to once again gather and dine in the space on the first floor of the Community Center.
Vice President for Student Life and Dean of Students Marcella Runell announced the reopening in a Dean’s Corner email to the community on Feb. 24. In the same email, she confirmed that the Cochary Pub & Kitchen will regularly be open from 5 p.m. to midnight on Thursdays and Fridays. According to Geoffrey Searl, Associate Vice President of Auxiliary Services, the pub will close early at 10 p.m. on Friday, Mar. 10, in preparation for spring break.
“The plan is to add more days. We just don’t know exactly when we can commit to that,” Searl said in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. The interview took place in the pub while it was closed on Monday afternoon. While the restaurant was silent and nearly empty during the interview, Searl recalled how, on the night of the reopening, the line of eager students had eventually stretched out of the pub’s doors.
“We did about 250 transactions, so it was busy,” Searle said. “We found out the point of sale system was having a hard time keeping up with the amount of people coming through the door, and then we found out there’s a setting we can adjust to make it go faster. It’s those things that, as you open a restaurant for the first time in three years, [make] you go, ‘so what are the takeaways?’ … And now we’ve got another week to regroup and figure it out.”
To cope with the high volume of customers expected on opening night, seniors used a reservation system to book their tables. Students waiting in line were offered cookies and free samples of the pub’s french fries by the staff.
The Cochary Pub & Kitchen originally opened in fall 2018 after extensive construction that expanded the Community Center, as part of the centralized dining initiative colloquially referred to as SuperBlanch. Prior to the campus shutdown in 2020, it was known for providing a cozy atmosphere and locally-sourced food and drink for students looking to unwind and socialize and was often home to community activities such as a regular trivia night.
In an email interview, Mollie Wohlforth ’19 reminisced about spending time at the pub, which she and her friends all referred to as “the Coch.”
“The Coch was a fun and fairly standard part of our senior fall and spring,” Wohlforth wrote. “I was writing my thesis at the time, so my other thesis friends — and anybody else doing work on Thursday nights — would always head there for a drink and some end-of-week work time.”
Members of the Class of 2023 are some of the only current students who may have accessed the pub prior to its shutdown in March 2020. Chelsea Gyimah ’23, who visited the pub during its reopening on March 3, recalled fond memories of karaoke nights and spending time with friends there as a first-year.
“The pub was always really good, old-fashioned stomping grounds,” Gyimah said. “And I think it’s nice because us being the last class to know what it was like pre-COVID was really sentimental.”
Previous community updates from Dining Services and the College have attributed the pub’s sustained closure to staffing issues, which caused its anticipated reopening to be delayed multiple times. At one point, the pub was estimated, by Dining Services, to be able to reopen in September 2021. Staffing issues have also contributed to the delayed reopening of the Frances Perk cafe located in Williston Memorial Library, which began serving students again in October 2021, as well as the limited availability of several stations in the Dining Commons over the past few years.
Searl stated that there will be a few opportunities for student workers to prepare coffee bar drinks, but the majority of the pub’s staff will be hired outside professionals who can handle alcohol and food preparation.
The current Cochary Kitchen & Pub menu offers a variety of hot and cold coffee bar drinks, as well as a modest selection of alcoholic beverages. For snacks and appetizers, the pub offers hand-cut french fries with additional BBQ and truffle salt variations, as well as a Mediterranean platter and a honey sriracha fried cauliflower dish. Main entrees available for order include a house salad and a bacon cobb salad, as well as a selection of sandwiches, including a Mount Holyoke beef burger, a grilled chicken sandwich and a vegan kelp burger. Baked goods will also be offered. The menu for each night is available on Mount Holyoke’s website.
Alcoholic beverages can be purchased by students over the age of 21 who present a valid legal photo ID, such as a driver’s license, with one beverage allowed per customer. All alcohol purchased must be consumed within the pub area.
The menu items are made primarily with locally sourced ingredients obtained through partnerships between the College and various farms and breweries located throughout Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont. According to a board in the pub, the Cochary Pub & Kitchen also uses ingredients obtained from Teatulia and Pierce Bros. Coffee to prepare drinks. Many of these partnerships existed before the pub’s 2020 shutdown, as well as some partnerships carried over from the Dining Commons.
Currently, students can purchase food and drink at the Cochary Pub & Kitchen with any tender valid on campus. This includes cash, credit/debit, MHC Dollars, or the money in a student’s MHCXpress account. The only exception to this is that alcoholic beverages may not be purchased with MHC Dollars, due to state law.
While the current menu options are slightly simplified compared to those offered before the pub’s closure in 2020, Searl states that Dining Services hopes to eventually fully restore the former menu as the restaurant completes the transition back into being open.
“Having those cookies again, we haven’t had those since first year,” Gyimah said of the pub’s opening night. “But that was also something that was like a little memorandum of first year, for sure, and being a new person on campus and just having some staple little snacks that remind you of that time.”