Review: Coast Starlight Diner

Review:  Train food on the Amtrak is often bad.  Often, it comes in the form of a revolting-looking squished ham sandwich.  But this is not the case on the Coast Starlight, a train to and from Seattle and Los Angeles.

Okay, so the food downstairs sucks.  But the Coast Starlight Diner serves great food.  Unfortunately, it's pricey, but if you can afford it for one meal while on the train, I recommend it.

Geography:  Describing the geography of a restaurant that constantly moves between many culinary regions, and does not belong solely to any one of them?  Challenge accepted.  But because of this, we must develop a new concept in cuisine; a style of cooking defined by the transportation industry.  Transportation cuisine is a mimic of a fusion cuisine, defined by the stereotypes of the cuisines that the transit line runs through.  But it is only a mimic on a PR level, because it only caters to the stereotype cuisines of the usually-vast regions it runs through.

For example, the Coast Starlight runs through the states of California, Oregon, and Washington.  The Coast Starlight takes the cooking styles that the states are most famous for (their culinary stereotypes), and use them with various ingredients to create variations on widely-familiar dishes (burgers, omelettes, and others) that are not common to most of the areas of those states, but share widely-known cooking styles from those states.  The food is good, and reminds outsiders of those states.  But it is in no way authentic.