Other trains affected by the Oct. 1 changeover are the City of New Orleans and Cardinal, which today offer sit-down meals to both coach and sleeper passengers in a separate dining area, but the limited menu is pre-prepared and heated on board.
The service model is similar to the one utilized on the Capitol and Lake Shore: sleeping car travelers’ meals and one alcoholic beverage are included in the ticket price, while coach passenger access and dining options are limited to what’s available in each train’s cafe car.
But at a presentation and tasting for the media on Washington Union Station’s Track 30 aboard Viewliner II diner Tallahassee last Friday, Vice President, Product Development and Customer Experience Peter Wilander and Executive Chef David Gottlieb outlined how they believe the new menu would improve mealtime for all six trains.
For presentation the balsawood box and green bags are out, replaced by a tray holding the main dish and a salad. “The box itself had an unanticipated consequence of service degradation,” admits Wilander, who displayed examples of the old and new packaging and food items next to each other. As for the trays, “We’re starting with an off-the-shelf design that will allow us to progress to the next iteration (creating) our own molds to do something different,” he says. Unlike the boxes and their contents which generated mountains of trash despite being touted as a “sustainable choice,” the new trays are washable and reusable.
Unlike their predecessors, the main dishes are prepared in new vendor New Horizon Foods Inc. kitchens and flash frozen, which enables them to be heated in a convection oven. Gottlieb tells Trains News Wire, “There was a lot of back and forth in a competition with three or four vendors, and we tested everything in our test kitchens” at Amtrak’s Consolidated National Operation Center in Wilmington, Del.
Similar to the choices rolled out on the Capitol and Lake Shore, the new menu includes braised beef in a red wine sauce, chicken fettuccine, and a vegan Asian noodle bowl. Added are a Creole shrimp and Andouille sausage casserole and a pasta and meatballs “kids meal.” There are no cold options but all hot dishes come with a side salad and a dessert brownie.
A big plus is the fact that the Cardinal finally gets a Viewliner II diner, even if only passengers lucky enough to book the train’s single sleeping car are able to use it. One Viewliner sleeper remains out of service from the Cayce, S.C., Silver Star accident, according to Roger Harris, Amtrak’s EVP, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer, and this has precluded operating a second sleeper in each of the Cardinal’s two consists.
The food is obviously designed to mix together in one bowl, precluding any serving of individually-cooked steak, chicken, or fish with separate side dish vegetable and salad dressing options. Amtrak briefly tried similar “pre-plating” as an economy move on the City of New Orleans in the mid-2000s but the experiment was quickly dropped when customers complained about the lack of choice.
Another significant drawback is that on the Cardinal, Meteor, Crescent, and southbound City, the identical menu is offered at both lunch and dinner. Breakfast is essentially unchanged from the Lake Shore-Capitol model: a continental breakfast with one hot egg, ham, and cheese sandwich option.
Depending upon trip length, the same meal may also repeat – southbound dinner and northbound breakfast on the Meteor and Crescent, and eastbound dinner and westbound breakfast on the Cardinal. Connect between any of these trains at Washington or New York, and Midwest-Florida travelers double the repetition. Overnight trains’ cafe cars are to be stocked with some of the fresh sandwich options available on the Midwest, Northeast, and California corridors, but those need to be purchased separately.
