Picture this: it’s three in the morning during finals week. You’ve been studying for eight hours. Your stress is peaking. You doomscroll to suppress it, but your eyes are singed from staring at your screen for so long. Every swipe on your For You Page is either news of a new pandemic, some guy sitting in his car shoveling a Chili’s Triple Dipper into his mouth or an AI video of a dog dancing. The latter of the three makes you question every decision you’ve ever made. Your cortisol levels are so high, you’ve forgotten to eat — but who wants to cook at 3 a.m.? Nobody.
UCI has a simple solution to your stress — and it’s not massage chairs. Instead, they’ve allocated funds to build a 24/7 Denny’s on the terrace next to Steinhaus Hall. Nothing says mental health support like a stack of pancakes in the middle of the night.
You walk Ring Road either by yourself or with a couple of friends. Lamp posts guide you to the bright yellow sign that reminds you why you chose this school. All we need is a Denny’s, right? All your worries can be solved for under $10. Who cares about the burden of finding an internship or your anxieties about affording basic needs? Just enter the lobby and take in the inviting aroma of coffee and bacon.
You sit in a booth. The restaurant’s windows overlook Aldrich Park, where students pretend to relax for three minutes before checking whether they’ve gotten a C on an exam or been replaced by AI. For a moment, all your worries cease to exist. You glance at the grease-coated menu and order an orange juice and a Grand Slam, the closest thing left to affordable luxury in your life. As you wait for paradise on a plate to arrive, you look around the restaurant. Instead of people, there are robot waiters — another comforting reminder that you now need to compete with a robot for an entry-level job. A student, already 10 coffees deep, writes their final paper with tears in their eyes at the booth beside you. Denny’s is helping them, you think, without the coffee they wouldn’t be able to stay awake.
Think of all the fond memories we could make sitting in booths for hours on end. We’d split pancakes at three in the morning and argue about whether our degrees will be obsolete by the time we leave the restaurant.
Like so many of UCI’s ingenious plans, Denny’s is the one for Gen Z — a generation more stressed than all the ones before it. College and life are more expensive, job prospects are grim and the spectre of artificial intelligence haunts us all. A Denny’s on campus would solve all of these problems, as students would be able to “stop and look around once in a while.”
And maybe — just maybe — when we look back on this time years from now, we won’t remember the all-nighters, the rent we couldn’t afford or the constant panic of trying to get an A in every class. We’ll remember pancakes and coffee, UCI’s official treatment plan for an entire generation on the verge of burnout. Denny’s at UCI would become a landmark destination, think Disneyland with more magic. I have no doubt that it would be the cure to our stress. Alumni would bring their kids back to show them where their student debt began. Who needs systemic change when you can order a Grand Slam?
Sam Jenson is an Opinion Intern for the spring 2026 quarter. He can be reached at sjenson1@uci.edu.
Edited by Ruby Goodwin.
Interested in becoming an intern or a contributing writer for the Opinion section?
Contact us at opinion@newuniversity.org!