Represented the luxury as a European dining car

Represented the luxury as a European dining car

On October 4, 1883, the legendary Orient Express L’Ast in Paris and meandered leisurely through Europe on the way to Constantinople, as Istanbul was called at the time. During a seven -day tour, the 40 passengers - including numerous prominent writers and dignitaries - lived in mahogany -colored comfort and spent their time in smoking compartments and padded armchairs made of soft Spanish leather.

the culinary experience in the dining car

The most luxurious experience took place in the dining car. With a menu that included oysters, chicken, chicken, turbot with green sauce and much more, the choice of dishes was so extravagant that part of a luggage car had to be converted to create space for an additional refrigerator for food and alcohol. Used by flawlessly dressed waiters, guests from crystal glasses enjoyed eating on a fine porcelain and used silver cutlery. The interior of the restaurant was decorated with silk curtains, while works of art beautified the space between the windows.

The newspaper rapporteur Henri Opper de Blowitz, one of the maiden passengers, noticed: “The bright white tablecloths and napkins, artistically and coquettish folded by the sommeliers, the glittering glasses, the ruby ​​red and top -wing wine, the crystal clear water caraffes and the silver capsules of the champagne bottles - they blind each other's eyes inside as well as outside. ”

a logistical masterpiece

The opulent passenger experience of the Orient Express was later immortalized by authors such as Graham Greene and Agatha Christie in pop culture. However, the food during the trip was primarily a triumph of logistics and engineering. Just four decades earlier, the idea of ​​preparing and serving hot meals on board a train would have been almost unimaginable.

In the early days of traveling with the railway, the passengers either brought their own meal or fed when the schedule allowed cafés. In Great Britain, for example, meals were served in so -called railway freshness rooms from the 1840s, whereby the quality often left a lot to be desired. Charles Dickens, a frequent traveler of the British railways, reported on a visit to such an establishment, where he acquired a pork pest, which consisted of "tough lumps of cartilage and fat", which he tangled "as if from an sterile soil" with a fork.

The beginnings of the food cars

The British might have been pioneers of railway technology in the 19th century, but the history of the dining car began in America. In 1865, the engineer and industrialist George Pullman introduced a new era of comfort with his Pullman sleeping car or "palace car" and two years later the first "hotel on wheels", the president. The latter was the first train car that offered on board meals, including regional specialties such as Gumbo, which were prepared 6 feet in a kitchen.

Pullman followed his extremely successful president with the first menu, the Delmonico, named after the New York restaurant, which is considered America’s first fin dining restaurant. Until the 1870s, dining cars could be found on sleeping trims all over North America.

But it was the Belgian civil engineer and entrepreneur Georges Nagelmackers who brought the idea to Europe and raised the experience to new heights. He recognized the potential for luxurious sleeping cars in Europe and started to revolutionize traveling with the railway on the continent with the Company of the Wagons-Lits (CIWL, or simply WAGONS-LITS) founded in 1872.

The heyday of the train travel

In the 1920s, the railway ride in the west was considered a "golden era". When Europe emerged from the devastation of the First World War, business travelers and adventurous holidaymakers began to use the advantages of smoother, quieter and faster steam locomotives. While the Wagons-Lits routes led to North Africa and the Middle East, modern metal wagons that replaced the old wood models were introduced. Prominent artists and designers were commissioned to decorate the cars, including the magnificent dining car.

The company was running over 700 dining cars by the end of the next decade, but an even larger on-board luxury form was created: eating on the pitch. Known as a Pullman Lounges (at that time the name of the American industrialist was a synonym for luxurious train trips), the new car was introduced on various daily services. Instead of waiting for lunch or dinner, the passengers were catered for on huge, swiveling armchairs with comfortable headrests. The cars proved to be "revolutionary", said Mettetal, and described them as "the most luxurious cars that have ever been created".

the slow decline

After the Second World War, both the railways and passengers learned significant changes. The trains became faster, so the travelers had less time to spend during the trips; The advent of the commercial flight and a explosion of the private car owned the luxurious way of traveling.

The economy of food production also changed in accordance with the model, which was specified by airlines, with meals were completely prepared outside the train (and finally eaten by the passengers from components' plastic plates with one -way cutlery and napkins). In 1956, Wagons-Lits opened a new, modern industrial kitchen, equipped with large-scale cooling systems and meat base areas, in which over 250 employees prepared food for all trains that were carried out by Paris.

The importance of food decreased in the priority ranking of the travelers. As a result, the convenience and comfort, including self-service buffet trolleys, mixed with simpler, cafeteria-like dishes. In the 1960s, the company brought portable “minibars” to the market - initially with 23 products, including sandwiches - that were rolled through the train and offered food to the passengers at eye level.

In the dishes, the train operators began to sell no more opulence, but the feeling of modernity and innovation, said Mettetal, whose exhibition (and an accompanying book ) advertising photos from the archives of Wagons lits and the state-owned French railway SNCF. An advertising photo from 1966 (shown above) shows a dining room on the Le Capitole, a Wagons Lits Express between Paris and Toulouse, on which the speed meter of the train can be clearly seen.

"It is a picture that conveys the idea that you can eat on a train that drives more than 200 kilometers per hour," said Mettetal. "But it shows only a family, with a couple and only one child, so it's very different. It is a new type of passenger, sociological."

In the 1970s and 1980s, kitchens largely disappeared from the European railways. And despite the emerging interest in traveling by train, food cars (or at least those with kitchens) are now largely reserved for tourism. Many of them work with nostalgia-such as the new Orient Express connection, which is to be revived in 2025 and has a dining car, whose website says "reinterpreted the codes of the legendary train"-and the opportunity to reinvent a time when the food was not just a luxury, but the luxury.