It is said that travel broadens the mind. If you take pudding in the restaurant car of a First Great Western train, the same journey can also broaden the arse. Think of it as a package deal. I will admit that, foodwise, First Great Western would not have been my first choice of train company (rightly, as it turned out). Virgin Trains may seem incapable of getting you anywhere you want to go on time, but it has been running some imaginative catering experiments on its services for a while now.
More intriguingly, GNER has recently employed the services of chefs such as Rowley Leigh and Richard Shepherd to pep up its menus.
But it's only worth sitting in a dining car if you have lots of time on your hands, and it happened that the long journey I was undertaking took me westwards to the roll and tuck of Devon. This has its advantages. The view is terrific, particularly as the train sweeps down the shore of the River Exe estuary and out along the coast towards Dawlish. On a hot summer's day, with a gentle haze hanging over the horizon so that the place where the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky met was but a smudge, it was a privilege to be in that seat. It's only a pity most of the food couldn't match the view.
The menu is sensibly short, with just four choices in each course. The key to cooking in cramped train galley kitchens, it seems to me, is pragmatism. There's no place for dishes that need intricate on-the-spot preparation. Instead, good ingredients, prearranged, are what's called for. The choice of starters appeared to have understood this. There was a soup, a pâté, melon or tart, all at between £4 and £5. I chose the latter: a sun-blushed tomato tart with mozzarella and guacamole.
Half an hour later it hadn't turned up and there were only five of us in the carriage. 'We're waiting to see if anybody else wants lunch,' I was told sharply by the waitress. They didn't start serving until everybody was in? 'It's the way we've always done it,' she said, as if this were an explanation. Apparently, lunch was served at their convenience rather than mine, an impression only emphasised when they started reaching over me as I was eating to clear away the cutlery and crockery from places not taken at the table.
As to that tart, it was the kind of thing I could have constructed at home from a quick sweep around the Sainsbury's deli counter, and I suspect Sainsbury's and I would have done a better job. The base was a few layers of dry filo pastry. The tomatoes tasted more of vinegar than fruit, the mozzarella tasted of nothing and the guacamole was just plain odd. For my main course, I ordered a fillet of mahi-mahi - a dense, white fish - with a chilli sambal and vegetable chips. From the lumps of albumen on the surface, I could see that the fish was overcooked, though to be fair it was not terribly so. It was not served well by the sticky slick of overly sweet chilli sauce. As to those vegetable chips, they reminded me of the things they sell in bags at Pret A Manger. This is not a good thing.
I looked to pudding to rescue the meal. From the choice of two - they hadn't been able to get hold of any cheese - I chose the cranberry and orange pudding. It sounded exactly the thing for a hot summer's day.
It wasn't. It was exactly the thing for a cold winter's day, as the word 'pudding' should have indicated. It was a dense, thigh-and-buttock-expanding steamed pudding with custard. For the record, it was the best part of the meal by far - moist, fruity, moreish - and that was down to all the preparation having been done elsewhere. While it was also the most inappropriate part of the meal, it did at least prove that they could get it right. It was just a pity they hadn't managed it at every course. Oh well. At least I had the view.
