Lake Shore Limited - which type of business class car is used?

[MARC Rider]

With the downgraded dining, the Cafe Car is more desirable than the beautiful new Diners, paid for by taxpayers and used only to microwave TV dinners. I think the remedy is to bring back real dining service to the New York section, and let Boston keep its Cafe/Business car.

Have you looked at the current cafe car menu? Bad as Flex dining is, it's better than what's on offer in the cafe if you want more than a snack.

 

[joelkfla]

Have you looked at the current cafe car menu? Bad as Flex dining is, it's better than what's on offer in the cafe if you want more than a snack.

Don't they still have DiGiorno pizza & Hebrew National hot dogs? Neither gourmet nor health food, but not amorphous mush.

And a bagel w/ cream cheese doesn't sound too bad for breakfast.

 

[PVD]

What I don't see on the National Cafe Menu that appears on most of the regional or corridors, are the sandwich selections, which are generally decent, as well as a few other items that aren't bad.

 

[Sidney]

Don't they still have DiGiorno pizza & Hebrew National hot dogs? Neither gourmet nor health food, but not amorphous mush.

And a bagel w/ cream cheese doesn't sound too bad for breakfast.

When I'm in Coach I always get the bagel and cream cheese. I do wish they would offer that as part of the flex breakfast.

 

[MARC Rider]

Don't they still have DiGiorno pizza & Hebrew National hot dogs? Neither gourmet nor health food, but not amorphous mush.

And a bagel w/ cream cheese doesn't sound too bad for breakfast.

They stopped serving the bagel and cream cheese due to Covid. And on the Northeast Regional cafe cars, they no longer serve salads or cold sandwiches. Not to mention the fresh fruit cup is gone from both the regional cafe menus and the flex breakfasts.

The pizza is tolerable, a Hebrew National hot dog is OK, but you have to make sure they take the bun out of the package and toast it separately from the hot dog; microwaved bread is chewy and horrible. Neither are a substitute for a full meal.

While the flex meals could be better, they aren't that bad, and I suspect that if they took the time to plate them nicely, most diners probably wouldn't have noticed that much of a difference, as the traditional dining food was going downhill before COVID. Of course, the main reason they switched to flex meals was to cut back the staffing, so there's nobody to plate meals, anyway.

 

[MARC Rider]

What I don't see on the National Cafe Menu that appears on most of the regional or corridors, are the sandwich selections, which are generally decent, as well as a few other items that aren't bad.

This is absolutely true (or at least it was before COVID decimated the regional cafe menus). If they're not going to serve coach passengers in the dining car, they should at least have an expanded cafe menu on the long-distance trains. I do seem to recall that right before COVID they offered some sort of tray dinners in the cafe car. And there was the fried chicken platter loaded on in Havre, MT for coach passengers on the Empire Builder.