About Amtrak Dining!
How does the song go?
East is East and West is West
and the wrong one I have chose . . .
If you’re planning an overnight train ride and you’re ready to pay extra for a sleeping car, may I suggest that you stick to trains running west of the Mississippi River. Significant improvements have been made in the dining car menu on those trains.
There’s Amtrak’s “signature” steak, a chicken dish, a fish offering (I’m not a fish eater, but I think it’s salmon), and there’s a pasta dish.. They’ll start you with an appetizer and there are one or two nice desserts.
Furthermore, your first glass of wine or beer is on the house.
In stark contrast, there are the meals served to sleeping car passengers on trains operating east of Chicago, including the Florida trains. For appropriate descriptors of those culinary offerings, the cost of which is included in your fare, any number of words leap to mind: awful . . . vile . . . inedible.
There are dozens more derogatory words clamoring for my attention, all of which are attempting to describe how truly terrible these meals are. The various dishes are prepared ahead of time— frozen, stored, then trotted out, nuked and presented to sleeping car passengers.
Discerning veteran rail travelers purchase individual items from the Lounge Car instead and, in so doing, spurn food being served in the Dining Car . . . food they have already paid for when they bought their ticket in the sleeper. And if that isn’t an indictment of the food offered on Amtrak’s eastern trains, I don’t know what is!
I was on the SWC last week from LAX to CHI. Food was OK. I bought a bottle the first night and out came a regular bottle rather than the half bottle; my tablemates don’t wine so I finished it in my roomette. This kept me going to the loo all night. I didn’t make that mistake again. In CHI I attended a conference dinner at Trump tower (a very expensive dinner and venue; I hotelled elsewhere). I had the surf and turf option at the “gala” dinner. The dinner steak at the TT was no better than the “signature” Amtrak steak and it was a little smaller than the “signature” steak. The fish was OK. I was amused by this culinary observation.