After roughly two years of using the Heart Mountain Hall kitchen to prepare food for its students, Northwest College is ready to cook and serve food in the new student center with the start of the spring semester.

On Dec. 13 food services contractor Sodexo cooked the last meal at the Park County Fairgrounds that was served at the Johnson Fitness Center — which served as the interim dining hall for the majority of the stretch while no student center was available.

The kitchen at the fairgrounds was made available to NWC via an agreement with the county government.

“This project would not have been possible without your support,” NWC President Lisa Watson told commissioners at their final meeting of 2024 last December. “Being able to serve our students food is a monumental task.”

Watson said to make it work at the fairgrounds, food services staff wound up making many improvements to the kitchen to enable cooking on such a large scale, and offered the county a number of pieces of equipment the college had brought in but wouldn’t need at the student center.

Watson is hopeful it’s quite a few years before there’s any need to reassemble its kitchens in another building for an extended period.

“Hopefully that building will serve us another 100 years,” Watson said of the brand new, $23 million student center.

“Our students have already been in the building, they love the building,” she said, adding that the one hiccup is learning air hockey and glass windows don’t mix.

“The whole community will be able to enjoy that building.”

An open house with formal ribbon cutting is tentatively scheduled for the end of January.

Spring semester classes begin Jan. 14.