Scrubs Cafe

Scrubs Café is exactly what you’d expect from a UC Davis campus spot: aggressively mediocre, coasting on convenience and affiliation rather than quality. The food is forgettable, the prices are inflated for what you get, and the service often feels indifferent or disorganized. It exists less as a real café and more as a functional prop—something to funnel students through rather than serve well. And that’s the UC Davis pattern in a nutshell. Everything is dressed up to look impressive, but underneath it’s shallow and low effort. The campus is full of posturing and nonsense, with too many students playing roles instead of building real skills—bragging loudly about affiliation while producing very little of substance. It’s a performance culture: image over ability, talk over work, hype over results. For all the self-congratulation, the outcomes don’t justify the attitude, and places like Scrubs Café are just small, edible examples of a much larger problem.

I love how they put so much effort into creating fresh buffet meals every day. All the food here is great, and there are an array of choices. Unfortunately, the hours are limited.

I ordered a plain large iced coffee. According to the menu this would be $5.5. I didn’t print out a receipt when I ordered, but upon checking my account later, I realized I got charged $7.5. There was no option to leave a tip, so I know the man who took my order just overcharged me. Not only was the service terrible, the man who served me was so rude when I ordered, but he overcharged me. I am incredibly disappointed. The coffee was not good, it was watered down and looked like iced tea. I also tried to call the manager, Beto, but he was not very helpful either. He told me there was no iced coffee on the menu, despite me ordering iced coffee and receiving that. I honestly hope this place either gets new employees or shuts down. Go to any other cafe, not this place.

On campus cafe and market. Good for an easy pick-me-up. Grab some of the bottled drink options and snacks or get some Peet's coffee. The grill is standard, nothing amazing but all the food is enjoyable if nothing else. Closes at 2pm

The self serve pizza is good and inexpensive, but the burgers don’t taste as good as they look. Thick patty without much flavor, and far too much mayonnaise on mine, the burger would actually slide around when I bit it. The bacon and other toppings also didn’t have much flavor. Can get much better burgers for the price of one here, but if you stick with the pizza and sandwiches you’ll likely leave satisfied