Kosher meals on Amtrak
 

Anyone have experience with ordering kosher meals on Amtrak as a sleeping car passenger? I'm going to be traveling on the Capitol Limited from Chicago to DC. I called up and she seemed to have issues processing the request due to the elimination of meals prepared on board in favor of pre-packaged meals. It says right on the timetable that it's an option. I've gotten kosher meals as an Acela First Class passenger with no issues in the past.

Sorry for the belated response - I don't know if this is useful anymore, but I've ordered kosher meals on long distance trains. Bear in mind that I haven't ridden in a sleeper since 2016, so this information may be somewhat stale, but as far as I know the Capitol Limited still offers kosher meals to sleeper passengers. The kosher meals are, of course, prepackaged, so I don't know why it would be any more challenging to provide now that everything else is prepackaged, too - on the contrary, if anything it should be more straightforward.

Call again, if you haven't already, or visit a ticket agent at a staffed station.

Called back in to confirm before my trip last week and something in the change to contemporary dining has broken their system and they can't put in the request. The agent says she can put it in manually but who knows if that will work. Looks like I'll need to plan for nothing being available... :mad:

Oh, that's no good at all. Good luck, and please report back. And, if you end up not getting the meals that you're entitled to, call Customer Relations and request compensation. (I got a $150 voucher after the Empire Builder was missing the meals I had requested.)

Have you tried placing your kosher meal request with an agent at a station? The result will probably be the same, but who knows?

I don't really have time to make it down to Union Station before my trip and I don't expect it to make a difference. The agent actually took down my info and called me back. Seemed that she had to check in with a bunch of different departments. She confirmed that kosher is an option with contemporary dining and a note was added to the manifest manually to add meals for me. It's just crazy that they switched to contemporary dining over a year ago and they still haven't ironed out how special meal requests work.

A lot about the kosher meal request process is crazy, although this is definitely a big step backwards.

(For instance: If you are planning to use a 12-hour upgrade coupon on Acela, there is simply no way to request a kosher meal, since kosher meals need to be requested at least 24 hours in advance, but kosher meals can't be requested in business class, even in anticipation of an upgrade to first. I was watching an agent punch in my meal request at NYP, and everything appeared fine until he submitted it, and the system threw up an error message and wouldn't accept it.)

Good luck.

Here's my full meal review. Meals were made by Borenstein. Let me know if you have any questions:

First I'll analyze dinner:

Dinner wrapped up
hot tray unwrapped
cold tray unwrapped

Dinner was ok. The beef was kind of tough and reheated rice is always kind of meh. The cold tray did not seem like it was taken out for enough time to thaw out so the couscous salad was basically a frozen brick. The dessert in the back right corner was an apple cake and it was ok, though a bit cold. Had a Fat Tire to go with my dinner after explaining to the dining car attendant that vast majority of beers are kosher.

Next let's do breakfast:
breakfast wrapped up
breakfast unwrapped

Breakfast was pretty good. The ratatouille that went with the omelette had a good kick to it. Took a bit for it to heat through though. Again the cold tray hadn't been given enough time to thaw out and was basically still frozen.

Overall the meals were alright, not the best airline kosher meals I've ever had, but far from the worst. The dining car attendant was great and definitely on her game and knew all about how to heat them up. She even had dinner heated up and ready to go for when I showed up for my sleeping car's dinner seating and I tipped accordingly.

Glad the food came through in the end, and thanks for the detailed report! It looks like the beef has changed since I last rode long distance in 2016 - here's what I got then:

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...c980e81d75.jpg

It was actually quite good, in my opinion - obviously not fresh, but better than I might have expected.

I've also encountered the partly frozen cold portion. I've found that it pays to go straight to the dining car shortly after boarding to introduce myself and make sure that the service attendants know what I need. If nothing else, they seem to get no information on which item I ordered for each meal, so I have the chance to tell them what I want when. (Not that they always remember correctly - I was once served the beef for breakfast by mistake, except that Borenstein also got it wrong and it was chicken. But that train had unusually bad staff in the dining car.)