A meandering, relaxing journey on a vintage steam train is a lovely way to spend the day and an infinitely less strenuous way of enjoying the countryside than hiking. It is no wonder they are so popular, especially now many reconditioned models have dining carriages and offer a dinner package as part of the deal. The particular steam train company who contacted Hog Roast Blackpool however, didn’t have such a grand locomotive with the capacity to provide on-board fine dining, but they decided that in order to compete with their grander rivals they should provide an upmarket dinner option at least once a month. They had to come up with a solution to giving people some great food and an experience to remember. After hearing about our ability to provide exactly that in any rural location imaginable, the company decided this was exactly what they were looking for and hired us immediately!
We were asked to cook at the small station at the halfway point of the journey, after which the train heads back to the starting point, and they wanted us to be ready to serve a sumptuous spread to the diners on their carriage tables! As they decided to host their dining experiments on the last Sunday of every month, they opted for our melt in the mouth sirloin of beef, rather than a hog roast, served with our own rich red wine gravy, horseradish sauce, Yorkshire puddings, garlic infused roast potatoes and fresh seasonal vegetables. With a menu like that to wow them at the halfway point of the journey, the steam train travellers were in for a treat!
We heard the rumble of the train approaching as we were adding the final tweaks to the decadent meal, but here at Hog Roast Blackpool, we don’t need a 2-minute warning because, unlike a lot of trains we always run to such a precise schedule! The diners were all rather dazzled by the lovely lunch we had prepared for them and all agreed it was food fit for the Orient Express! The lunch was even more of a hit than the train company had hoped for and without further ado, they asked Hog Roast Blackpool to do it all over again for them next month!