Fort Drum welcomes the Army’s third privately operated dining facility

The Army opened a third privately run dining facility last week at Fort Drum, N.Y., and has plans to open the next one in September at Fort Bragg, N.C.

The Belvedere Bistro, named in honor of the 10th Mountain Division’s nighttime assaults on Mount Belvedere in Italy during World War II, officially opened Thursday. It joins two other bistros operating under the ownership of Compass Group USA at Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Carson, Colo.

“We are spreading this concept across the Army because this is what we owe our soldiers,” Lt. Gen. Chris Mohan, commander of Army Materiel Command, said during a grand opening ceremony. “Today marks another important step in improving the daily experience of our soldiers and their families. And it is very simple: if you make an investment in the nutrition of our soldiers, that is an investment in readiness.”

A soldier chooses food items during the soft opening of the Belvedere Bistro on July 27, 2026, at Fort Drum, N.Y. The official opening was July 30.  (Mike Strasser/Fort Drum Garrison Public Affairs)

The bistro is open to everyone on post but is aimed specifically at encouraging more soldiers who live in the barracks to use their meal card entitlements. Those entitlements translate into $39 worth of “freedom dollars” available to spend in the bistro.

The freedom dollars are split into $9.57 for breakfast, $15.86 for lunch and $13.57 for dinner.

After a soldier pays, a receipt shows how much of the entitlement was spent and how much remains. The balance can also be spent in a traditional dining facility as long as they have not already dipped into funds allocated for that meal.

Use of the two established bistros has been high, said Samantha Tyler, spokeswoman for Army Materiel Command. The Fort Carson bistro has seen 241% growth in the average meals served per day compared to the dining facility it replaced, she said. More than 5,600 individual soldiers have visited the bistro since it opened in April.

At Fort Hood, the growth has been about 151% with about 7,100 individual soldiers visiting since its February opening, Tyler said.

Materiel Command expects the Rally Point Bistro to open at Fort Bragg in September. Fort Stewart, Ga., is the fifth base included in Compass Group’s contract, but that bistro’s opening has been delayed until 2027.

The Army has additional contract proposals out to privatize 11 more facilities across the branch.