THE new ‘Best of British’ menu introduced to coincide with the launch of Virgin Trains’ new high-frequency services on its West Coast routes is showing every sign of going down a treat with passengers.

At the same time, on-board staff are pulling out all the stops to make sure passengers are served equally fast, to tie in with the more intensive service pattern, faster journeys and quicker station turnaround times.

Chris Gibb, chief operating officer of Virgin Trains, told Railnews before the start of the new services that one of the biggest challenges of VHF was to ensure that the ever-popular full British breakfast could be delivered efficiently.

That challenge has been overcome. Following extensive training and special sampling sessions, on-board and Rail Gourmet supply teams have settled in quickly to changed methods of presentation and the new catering offer for passengers on first class tickets.

I travelled on a Virgin Trains service to sample the results and found that the on-board service was slick and polished.

A customer wanting to alight at Rugby – 47 minutes from Euston and the first stop of a morning train – asked if he would be served his full cooked breakfast in time to enjoy it.

He was told jokingly that the chef would be sacked if not and, sure enough, a high quality meal, preceded by juice and toast, arrived in good time.

The new complimentary menu for passengers travelling first class between London Euston, the West Midlands, Liverpool, Manchester, North Wales and Glasgow has been sourced entirely from British produce, with full provenance given from farm to plate.

Virgin Trains product development and purchasing manager Nic Cuthbertson exp-lained: “With the help of our staff we researched the ideal menu and ensured that all its contents could be traced and authenticated through the entire food chain.
“We spent many months finding the highest quality ingredients from the highest quality producers and then worked closely with our staff to develop a range of menus for preparation and service within the limited confines of a train.”

Among the new ingredients are traditional English sausages, Welsh and Scottish beef and high-quality British cheese. Pork sausages, from outdoor-reared pigs and made with fresh herbs and natural casings, form part of the break-fast menu, served with sweet-cure Suffolk Crown bacon and free range Yorkshire farm eggs on a potato rosti.

The sausage meat is from Hampshire cross-bred pigs and sourced from farms in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and East Anglia, and the bacon from outdoor-reared pigs in Bury St Edmunds.

Also on offer, in a sandwich served with Stilton cheese, is Scotch rare beef – one of the Light Bites menu options served throughout the day.

Alternatively, there is Lockerbie Cheddar, an award-winning medium mature cheese from Scotland’s Lockerbie Creamery, served on malted brown bread with British Bramley apple and ginger chutney. A selection of cheeses from around Britain is available as part of the evening meal.

One of the challenges Virgin Trains says it faced in demonstrating the provenance of food items was a lack of consistent and transparent criteria and standards.

Whilst ‘free range’ and ‘organic’ are frequently-used terms understood by customers, it found that the same cannot be said for ‘outdoor-bred’ or ‘outdoor-reared’.

Nic explained: “The UK food industry needs to make it easier for customers and consumers to understand the provenance of the food they are eating. It seems incredible that we have had to pay for an independent audit to confirm the provenance, on top of the premium price we pay for high-quality, non-intensively farmed foods.

“The food industry should look to the effectiveness of consumer understanding of the Fair Trade brand, and develop its own recognised standards.”

To present the new food, there is stylishly simple china from Stoke-on-Trent-based company Dudson, which has supplied more than a quarter of a million pieces to replace the place settings introduced with the first Pendolino services four years ago.

“Response from our customers has been very encouraging, and shows that many of them really appreciate the Best of British choices, as well as our ‘turn up and go’ 20-minute frequency services between London and Birmingham/Manchester,” said Nic.

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