When you walk into Blazer Cafe, nothing has changed on the surface.

The walls are the same light-yellow shade, the chairs and tables are the same, the sandwich station is still separate from everything else, and the pizza still sits to your left when you pass the register. The hamburgers, chicken breasts and hot dogs are still available.

But the atmosphere is different. The energy is sapped from the room. It’s not the same that it was even four months ago.

I don’t know what necessarily makes this true. Maybe it’s taking away the buffet island that made the floor not seem so big and rambunctious. Without it, it resembles the blandness of Commons — a room that the university forced into a restaurant instead of a room built as one.

Maybe it’s that the televisions have been turned off, taking what had been a joy for my friends and me and turning it into auxiliary silence. I’ve watched more postseason baseball games in Blazer in the last two years than in my apartment, and I made two good friends watching the Cincinnati Reds and Scott Rolen flop around in the final three games of their playoff series against the San Francisco Giants.

The food has decreased in terms of quality and selection. I visited Blazer Cafe four times in the last two weeks, and some of the usual favorites were missing. Chicken tenders were replaced by nothing at all. Macaroni and cheese, which students mowed through each time it was available, was not to be found. Mashed potatoes, another student favorite, was non-existent. Chicken breasts can be compared to chargrilled grass compacted inside of a skin coating, but only if the grass had no texture or flavor at all.

There were some positives. The pizza slices have gotten larger and more tasty. A Blazer Burger can still be eaten — I ate one three out of the first four times I went there — and it’s still satisfying. Beef roast, depending on the day one eats at Blazer, is spicy and flavorful in a good way. Hot dogs exceed ballpark standards. The sandwich and salad bar is still a pleasant plus; but why would you walk to Blazer and pay $8 — which is two dollars cheaper than last year’s price — for a Blazer sandwich over a Subway foot-long sub or a Rising Roll sandwich? I wouldn’t.

But the lack of a buffet island limits your hot plate choices. Unless you like chicken breasts stuffed inside of an odd mush Blazer calls broccoli casserole, or are a heavy vegetable eater, you may find it difficult to find things outside of pizza, burgers and hot dogs. That was a part of the character of Blazer in previous years; it is not so much a part of Blazer today.

It’s more evident on the dessert table. It was a place where you could once find several types of cookies, cakes, pies and brownies, but it’s now a place that usually only contains cookies and a dried-out lemon cake. Healthy people will eat healthy, but they are not the people who are eating dessert. People who like chocolate chip cookies and chocolate brownies eat dessert.

An official from UK Dining spoke during my freshman adivising conference in summer of 2012, and he told the 1,000 or so freshmen and their parents in the crowd that university food is not like your high school cafeteria. My dad, sitting next to me, gave out a hearty belly-laugh, scoffing at that notion. The fact that they served us lukewarm lasagna immediately following that speech was irony enough, but Blazer Cafe did not fit that bill when I was a freshman.

Now? I think Blazer Cafeteria is more fitting.

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