Branded as a sustainable café with a locally grown and environmentally friendly menu, the Tempe campus Memorial Union’s Engrained restaurant has cut its hours back after operating full-time for just more than a semester.

The restaurant now serves only the lunchtime crowd, closing at 4 p.m. instead of 7 p.m.

“We just weren’t seeing the numbers,” director Daun York said.

The eatery tried special offers and discounted meals but couldn’t avoid limiting hours to keep numbers up.

Late last semester, Engrained began offering an appetizer and two entrees for $20 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

By January, the deal was in place every single weeknight.

Almost all of the dinner customers were regulars, York said.

“We told them in person we were going to be closing for dinner, and now we’re seeing them at lunchtime,” she said, estimating that 99 percent of evening customers are still dining regularly, just earlier in the day.

The eatery has begun offering $5 budget meals, like many other restaurants in the MU, including Papa John’s and Einstein Bros. Bagels.

“[The budget meals] aren’t our most popular, but students like them,” York said.

Engrained sees a mixture of students, faculty and staff. The company doesn’t target any particular group, but York said she really appreciates student business.

“I completely enjoy all of the students that come in,” she said. “They could go a lot of other places, but they come to us.”

Overall, Engrained’s business plan has been successful, York said.

“We’ve gotten excellent feedback from students and [staff],” she said. “People want to eat healthier, and people want to eat better food.”

As the “green” lifestyle continues to sweep the nation and ASU’s School of Sustainability grows in popularity, more students are turning to options like Engrained.

Political science and philosophy freshman Alexa Kissinger said she eats at Engrained about once a week using her M&G dollars.

“I think there’s always going to be a small segment of students that are willing to pay almost twice as much for a meal if it’s local and sustainable,” she said.

But Kissinger said she typically sees more faculty and other adults eating at the restaurant than students.

“I would have used the two-for-$20 deal [at dinner], but I didn’t find out about it until they changed the hours and it wasn’t available,” she said.

Kissinger said though ASU is marketed as a sustainable campus, most students don’t even know about Engrained, and the restaurant isn’t as well-marketed around campus as it could be.

“You have to really care to pay that much for food [in the MU],” Kissinger said. “They have a $5 meal, but it’s like the size of a McDonald’s hamburger.”

Though Engrained, as a more upscale eatery, has experienced cutbacks, other MU fast-food-type outlets are actually thriving in this economy, especially compared to their national chains.

Director of the MU food court Georgette Warren said the chain locations aren’t suffering at all.

“We’re still holding our numbers,” she said. “We haven’t seen increases, but all of our national brands are maintaining their numbers.”

Per usual, the downstairs chains Quiznos, Burger King and Jamba Juice don’t get as much traffic as the upstairs joints and have always had lower numbers, but there haven’t been any decreases, Warren said.

“[Maroon and Gold] dollars are still holding us together,” she said.

Mandatory meal plans for freshmen living on campus may mean that fast-food locations in the MU aren’t likely to experience any drastic declines in the near future.

Reach the reporter at tessa.muggeridge@asu.edu.