There are many dining options on Stanford campus, and your access to them depends on your association with the various residences.  If you are a student in a dorm that has a Stanford Dining Plan, you can eat at any of the dining halls on campus and use your meal points.  If you are just visiting Stanford, you can still eat at those dining halls--you just have to pay around $7 for an all-you can eat buffet-style meal.

Stanford Residential Dining -- accessible to anybody with a Stanford Dining Plan or money in general

• Wilbur Dining: With a reputation for having a very large variety of foods, it serves the almost 720 residents of Wilbur Hall.  Although the food quality is definitely not the best, it makes up for it with variety.  However, a common complaint from most freshmen in Wilbur is that their ethnic foods "are not legit", as Jon H (Class of '12) put it.  Their Chinese and Korean dishes are usually made using too much oil and salt, and their sticky rice is often made out of long rice, resulting in an eclectic texture.  In general, most ethnic dishes do not use the right spices in the correct ratios, resulting in a very Americanized taste.  This is fine, but given the presence of dormitories like the Asian themed house Okada, this is often a reoccurring piece of critique.

• Stern Dining: This is another large dining hall similar to Wilbur, serving all the residents of Stern Hall.  Many claim that Wilbur is better than Stern, but in the end they are about equal.  Both emphasize variety over quality.  One distinct difference though, is that the rice at Stern is usually much better than that at Wilbur.  Stern also has two sets of frozen yogurt machines, and they tend to have a larger variety of desserts in general.
  

• Manzanita Dining: This is a fairly small dining hall located behind Kimball, and serves all three Manzanita dormitories.  Because of their size, each of their dishes seem to have garnered more care and better ingredients.

• Branner Hall: This serves Branner Hall, and is somewhat hard to find for the unaccustomed.  For dinner, they will often have a personalized fried rice bar, where the chefs will cook fried rice on the spot for you according to what you want in it.  Besides that, it is a fairly small low-key dining hall with not too much variety, as it is only meant to serve the residents of Branner.  Of course, that does not mean you are not allowed to eat their--it just means that they are of a smaller scale than larger dining halls such as Wilbur or Stern.
  

• Ricker Dining: This is reputed to be the best dining hall in all of campus.  It serves all of Governor's Corner.
  

• Toyon Eating Clubs: Starting in the 2009-2010 school year, Toyon's eating clubs will be under Residential Dining's control.  In past year's Toyon's eating clubs have been a selling point for drawing into Toyon.  However, it is impossible to judge their future quality, since Stanford Dining has many budget restrictions.  Hopefully though, they will be allowed to maintain their quality.

• Crother's Dining: Sometime in the next few years, Crother's Hall is scheduled to have its own dining hall.  At present, Crother's Hall is under construction for the 2009-2010 school year, so the closest dining hall will probably be either Toyon or Stern.  Crother's Dining is still in the planning stages, so details are to come in the next few years.
  

House Dining Options

Self-ops hire a chef to cook on weekdays, so you usually need an invitation from a resident to go eat there.  Since these are professional cooks, the food at self-ops tend to be very good, and rumors abound on campus as to the various chefs' strengths and weaknesses.  In general though, you should definitely try eating at a house at one point during your Stanford career.  In fact, these houses attract so many guests that some residences like Jerry even have a "guest-list" with limited spots for guests because their food is so popular.  Others such as Murray have a "just bring your guest over" policy and do not have such a guest allocation system in place.