What was your best meal aboard an Amtrak train?

Greg Moore wrote:

alex45 wrote:Eventhough this isnt a meal, I LOVE the huge chocolate chip cookie's that Amtrak Regionals serve on the NEC serve. They taste even better if u put them in the microwave for 30 seconds

I call these crack cookies.

I have no idea why they're so good, but I love 'em.

(and even better if the cafe attendent uses the actual OVEN there. Yes much to my surprise, Amtrak Cafe cars have a little oven next to the microwave!)

Finally after 4 years I FINALLY have an answer as to why the cafe attendants don't use the convection oven in the cafe car (other than my own notable experience mentioned above).

They're not permitted. Evidently there's a fan in there that has no guard on it. So it's not permitted. The Acela ovens have a fan guard so can be used.

So finally now I know why I've never seen any other cafe attendant use the oven. I'm guessing the one I DID see use it was breaking the rules. But damn, that cookie was great.

you cant expect fan guards to be put into cafe car ovens until amtrak gets hundreds of millions more funds .
or maybe its the other way around .

David Benton wrote:you cant expect fan guards to be put into cafe car ovens until amtrak gets hundreds of millions more funds .
or maybe its the other way around .

Yeah, I was thinking about that. I'm sure the actual cost of the guards is actually trivial. But then you'll have to figure in the additional cost of now maintaining a piece of equipment that hasn't been, etc. Oh well, to bad. While the microwave isn't 1/2 bad, I'm sure a real oven would improve some meals in the cafe even more.

David Benton wrote:you cant expect fan guards to be put into cafe car ovens until amtrak gets hundreds of millions more funds .
or maybe its the other way around .

You mean BILLIONS! Maybe, if they reach the hundred billion mark, they can put mints back on pillows in the sleepers . . . but it just might not be enough. Mints are expensive, and of course they'd have to figure in long-term maintenance of the mints, mint safety measures, and the extra 3 seconds of labor for the attendant to place them on each pillow. They might even have to add a second, union-wage attendant per car, just to be in charge of mints. As you can see, it adds up.

Back on topic, I recall my first trip on the Auto train in the early 90's had an excellent trout dish. My father and I both remarked that it was on par with "good restaurant fare." That was the last time I remember a really good meal in an Amtrak diner, and even then it was something of a rarity for me. I don't think the pre-diner-light fare from a few years ago was nearly as good as some made it out to be, and I don't think the current fare is remotely as bad as many feared . . . but I agree with Mr Norman, that nothing is very "memorable" about any of it.

JPS

Anything that was pre-"DINERLITE" was good, seriously.

In the Amtrak era, it was breakfast on the Southern Crescent in 1980. Eggs, bacon, grits, toast, and endless pots of coffee traveling from Atlanta through Lynchburg and Charlottesville to DC. Great Southern crew and no hurry to leave the dining car. Did Amtrak ever do that?
Charlie B.

we just back from a trip to orlando on the siver services. the food in the diner was good but not best i have had. we had the steak both ways. the food was served hot. the diner going south was a old nyc diner and rode good. coming home it was a older diner this was a little more bumpy. they seemed to have changed menus. the prices come north were higher but had a baked patato instead of mashed. of course it was much better than air line food.

I have to admit, last time I had breakfast on #4 it was decent but the best was the staff that let me sit and drink coffee until lunch. A++ performance.

On the Vermonter Getting Dunkin Doughnuts coffee in New Haven with the 30 min Layover...
2 hours later... Walking down the Street in Springfield MA with the other 30 Min layover Bringing pizza back on the train to eat in the Cafe Car.
other memerable moments,
On Oct 13th 2000 #56 Northbound getting free sandwiches curtesy of Amtrak for the train was running 2 hours late...
Getting off train #66 Or 67? with the stupid 1 hour Layover in NYP heading on my way south to Virginia Beach and going out to the street asking for a hot dog sausage at 2:15 in the Morning and heading back on the train with the hotdog sausage and sometimes a steak cabob.
one thing I would like to do soon is actually travel on the train out west. I have never done that.
the furthest I have gone by train is Newport News, VA, Boston MA, and White River JCt VT with my base out of Stamford CT

I've only ridden the LSL, and this was (to my dismay) *a week after* they went to Diner LIte. My luck and all that.

In any event, I was only aboard during breakfast hours, so my choices were the Eggs, the Continental, or the Railroad French Toast.. the latter of which still evokes thoughts of a hobo in a railcar with a small fire burning, gingerly toasting some bread on a stick.

Be that as it may, I used to swear by the French Toast (not that I had many options), but I eventually switched over to the eggs. It's not that the French Toast was necessarily *bad*.. it's just that.. they had to microwave it, you see, and sometimes, the ends would get over-done, making them unpalatable. The eggs were actually very nice, as well as the breakfast potatoes that accompanied them. Best was the croissant that is served on the side - it was nice and flakey, and always warm.

I sure wish I'd seen the good old days. Now that Grande Luxe is toast (not French, but still over-done,as it were), I'll likely never have a chance to see how rail travel was meant to be.

Gare_NY

hi55us wrote:

theozno wrote:On the Vermonter Getting Dunkin Doughnuts coffee in New Haven with the 30 min Layover...
2 hours later... Walking down the Street in Springfield MA with the other 30 Min layover Bringing pizza back on the train to eat in the Cafe Car.
other memerable moments,
On Oct 13th 2000 #56 Northbound getting free sandwiches curtesy of Amtrak for the train was running 2 hours late...
Getting off train #66 Or 67? with the stupid 1 hour Layover in NYP heading on my way south to Virginia Beach and going out to the street asking for a hot dog sausage at 2:15 in the Morning and heading back on the train with the hotdog sausage and sometimes a steak cabob.
one thing I would like to do soon is actually travel on the train out west. I have never done that.
the furthest I have gone by train is Newport News, VA, Boston MA, and White River JCt VT with my base out of Stamford CT

(On a 8 car regional, usually, if the engineer stops the train in the right spot) you can go to the 4th or 6th double (4th if traveling west, 6th if traveling east) (usually behind the cafe) at New Haven and use the vending machine to get a bottle of coke for $1.25. The vending machines(on every track) have a credit card swipe and I can do the move in about 30 seconds. I would not suggest doing this on the acela since they don't change crews, but dwell time in NHV for a regional is usually 4-5 minutes, if the train is running on time (or ahead of schedule).

On my trip on the Silver service . Breakfast : Spinach omlet
Lunch: Hot roast beef sandwich with real mashed potatoes. Buffalo chiken wings
Dinner: Flat iron steak with mashed potatoes, shrimp cocktail to begin with. Also a chefs special : Meat balls over Spanish rice. I was very happy with the food. I'm looking foward to my upcoming trip.

theozno wrote:On the Vermonter Getting Dunkin Doughnuts coffee in New Haven with the 30 min Layover...
2 hours later... Walking down the Street in Springfield MA with the other 30 Min layover Bringing pizza back on the train to eat in the Cafe Car.
other memerable moments,
On Oct 13th 2000 #56 Northbound getting free sandwiches curtesy of Amtrak for the train was running 2 hours late...
Getting off train #66 Or 67? with the stupid 1 hour Layover in NYP heading on my way south to Virginia Beach and going out to the street asking for a hot dog sausage at 2:15 in the Morning and heading back on the train with the hotdog sausage and sometimes a steak cabob.
one thing I would like to do soon is actually travel on the train out west. I have never done that.
the furthest I have gone by train is Newport News, VA, Boston MA, and White River JCt VT with my base out of Stamford CT

Wow, you totally missed the point of the thread. Awesome. We're talking about meals that were served to you, not stuff you brought back on the train... but thanks for trying.

Gare_NY wrote:I've only ridden the LSL, and this was (to my dismay) *a week after* they went to Diner LIte. My luck and all that.

Didn't they go back to regular diners on the LSL now or am I confused? I thought this was just due to a temporary equipment shortage.

I sure wish I'd seen the good old days. Now that Grande Luxe is toast (not French, but still over-done,as it were), I'll likely never have a chance to see how rail travel was meant to be.

Amtrak was never like the Grand Luxe/AOE but it's probably not really worse now than it ever was. Diner Lites are one thing, but there are still real dining cars and IMO while they may be worse in some ways than they used to be, they're better in others. On balance, it's kind of a wash.

Some people forget that there really were no "good old days" on Amtrak. I have some great memories of Amtrak's early days, but in a lot of cases they're memories borne out of the fact that Amtrak was such a rag-tag outfit in those days. I loved having 20 different types of cars from 20 different railroads running on the same train, even if they were all beat up and run down and patched together by employees who were underpaid and working equipment that was always broken or being held together with duct tape. Half the time you were lucky to get a hot meal at all in a dining car; they'd often just close them for the entire trip because something important broke, and not every train even had a proper lounge back then. (They may have had a lounge, but that doesn't mean they sold food. So you could go an entire trip without easy access to food, except at the longer stops. It was SOP in the early days of Amtrak to bring a cooler full of food with you on a long trip, just in case.)

The diners are actually a lot more reliable now even with all those extra years and miles. They may not always have real china or pan-fried food but at least the ones that are still running have nicely finished interiors and you can be reasonably sure that you'll get to eat if one of them is in your consist.

So book another trip on a train with a diner; you'll have as good an experience as anyone probably ever has in an Amtrak dining car, and probably a better experience than many people had in the past.

And yes, you can tell I've had some not-so-great experiences, and that most of my better experiences have been more recent. (Though honestly, I can't really remember *any* of the actual food I've eaten. Oh, except this fritatta we had for breakfast on the LSL a few years back, that was really good.)

I would like to declare that I actually like the Amtrak pizza! Every time I am on an Amtrak train with an cafe car, I get it. I just love its doughy-ness and how the grease from the cheese soaks it. Alright...you guys think of me as nuts officially now

The best meal I would I have to say would be when I had lunch on the Empire Builder back in August 2006 which I had a steak. The chef who prepared it cooked EXACTLY the way I liked it; well done but slightly burnt along the edges.

Though I would prefer it if Amtrak didn't serve soda from a can in the dinning car, but I understand standardization and all.