Breakpoint Café Opens in Brendan Iribe Center

Since it opened last semester, the sleek new Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering has been the go-to place for the latest in tech spaces and equipment. Until yesterday, what you couldn’t find there was a sandwich.

That’s when Dining Services opened the newest eatery on campus, Breakpoint Café, in the building’s expansive ground-floor atrium, across from the Antonov Auditorium.

This summer, the café will offer fresh pastries and a wide selection of Starbucks coffee, in addition to grab-and-go items like packaged wraps and salads that will appeal to morning foot traffic heading to campus from nearby apartments on Baltimore Avenue. (Bytes in the neighboring A.V. Williams Building is closed for the summer.)

When classes in the Brendan Iribe Center resume in the fall, it will be fully operational, becoming the first café on campus to have a sandwich, salad and rice bowl station where customers can choose ingredients, so popular in fast-casual restaurants. Breakpoint will also feature a variety of breakfast sandwiches and breakfast burritos, as well as soup, chili, and macaroni and cheese during lunchtime.

“This menu is much more complicated than most of our cafés, so we want to take the time to get things right before we move on,” said Dave Bullock, assistant director for retail operations at Dining Services.

Computer science major Ashwath Krishnan '21 came up with the café’s name, a term for pausing computer code while debugging. Krishnan won the naming contest in December. About 1,100 people helped choose among the 150 names submitted on Facebook.

“It looks nice and it’ll complement this beautiful place we’re in,” said Todd Holden, a senior web services developer in the Department of Computer Science, who had just grabbed his morning coffee.