text: No doubt you're right about many modern refectoria. But back in my monastery-visiting days, late 80s, early 90s, I ate in four Benedictine houses (Mount Saviour, Portsmouth, Christ in the Desert, and the one just east of Cuernavaca where Mount Angel monks were rebuilding), and recall that everyone was served at table, save for one evening at CitD, when we milled about in the kitchen serving ourselves.
  
  So far as I can tell, "tricliniaria" is not a common word in classical lit, with only one ref in the OCD (Varro, about a shaded dining room for use in summer). Anyway it seems an odd and unnecessary development from the much more common "triclinium." I don't know anything about how it may be used by Christian authors. For that matter I don't know how long the implication that such a room is where one reclines to eat persisted: at a certain point, could one sit in a chair in a triclinium?