Amtrak, you break my heart.

Yes, that’s a quote from famous 18th-century French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of the wonderful, inspiring and absorbing book The Physiology of Taste. And yes, his name is misspelled.

But it makes me want to weep that somewhere in the Amtrak system, someone even knew enough about Brillat-Savarin to want to put his famous quote (second only to his quip “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are”) on the front of the menu in diner cars across the country.

Then it makes me want to weep even more when I open up the menu and see not a brilliant new dish, but many of the tired old ones.

You’ve got your burger. You’ve got your pizza. You’ve got your veggie burger (which I actually ordered, and the waitress tried hard to sound enthusiastic about it). Sigh.

If I hadn’t been depressed by all these wasted culinary aspirations, I would’ve been better able to appreciate that the food is actually kind of good, in a standard-issue way. At dinner, things like lamb shank are on the menu along with the pizza and the burger. The last time Peter and I were on Amtrak, a couple of winters ago, we had a quite delicious dinner in somewhat elegant surroundings, and met a very cool painter from Alaska.

This time, we were only on the train for breakfast and lunch, when the menu is in the all-American doldrums, and you only get plastic cutlery. But what the heck, our eggs were fine, and then at lunch, Peter’s burger was actually quite beefy tasting, and my veggie thing was veggie-like. (I really don’t know what possessed me to order it. It won’t happen again.) And then our waitress offered to buy us a cheese-and-crackers kit from the bar car to go with our second half-bottle of wine.

Lunch in the diner–it’s no dinner, but what can you do? Poor Brillat-Savarin, probably rolling in his grave.