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The food is still microwaved on the ICE and presumably in other countries too, but the presentation is fantastic. The experience of eating in a proper restaurant while seeing the landscape roll by is amazing and while not all services need a restaurant or can support one I don't expect restaurants to go away. More automation might mean more people can work on the presentation of the food while the kitchen can take up less space which should overall improve the economics of the onboard eating experience.

Airplanes have the “serve luxurious food with no space or kitchen” down to a T.

One interesting case is Japan where a full dining car is a rarity and you’re expected to buy station meals when you depart.

I think Japan Railways figured out that a car full of passengers is worth a lot more than a kitchen/restaurant for the other 11 cars.

Exactly. It costs a lot of money to run a bullet train, and every seat is very valuable. They don't have space to waste on a kitchen or restaurant. They do sometimes have little food carts they'll push up and down the aisles that you can purchase meals from, though this depends on the route and time.

Riding a shinkansen isn't like riding some old-time long-distance train in Europe or North America; it's basically just like riding in an airliner, but on the ground and without TSA and the seats have more legroom. It's all about speed and convenience, not luxury.

There are, however, some luxury trains in Japan on some routes. They're not bullet trains though, and usually meant more for sightseeing travel.

As a counterpoint, German ICEs are just as much of a bullet train as Shinkansen are and they have full dining cars.

It might not actually be profitable, but it sure is sweet.

Maybe not so relevant to the economics of a dining car, but I have to take issue with “just as much of a bullet train”. Shinkansen are proper high speed rail with dedicated tracks, top speeds of 320km/h, and high speeds (260km/h or higher) across basically the entire network.

ICE trains run on the same lines used by slower services, and no train in Germany exceeds 300 km/h, with even that speed being attained only on quite small upgraded parts of the network.

The European rail network most similar to Shinkansen would be TGV.

Spain is also pretty fast.

That has very little to do with the ICE train itself though, which can do above 320 km/h just fine in regular service (on international connections though, since in Germany the global train speed limit is 300 km/h I believe).

While the high-speed tracks in Germany are indeed quite a bit of a patch-work, there are over 1000 km of track certified for >= 250 km/h (as of 2015; quite a number of more lines got finished since then, but I could not find the updated number that included them) and by now really rather long corridors are very high-speed. The route from Munich (south of Germany) to Berlin is now mostly covered with upgraded routes for example. I think the 4 hours for that route are quite competitive to Shinkansen times. The fastest Shinkansen route (from the listed operating speed the only one that actually operates at 320 km/h; all others only operate at 260-300 km/h) is the Tōhoku Shinkansen line, which takes 3 hours and 20 minutes for the same distance traveled.

The lack of dedicated tracks for high-speed passenger service matters a lot though. It’s part of the reason why those (very impressive) scheduled Munich-Berlin times are so often not achieved. The “slot” for the service is relatively small because slower trains (in particular freight) must be scheduled as well, so if the slot is missed for any reason, delays can compound very badly. I take the train between Munich and Berlin reasonably often and it’s usually running late, and sometimes by an hour or more.

Reliability is certainly one aspect where dedicated tracks helps a lot, but is not the only solution (see for example Switzerland). For Germany the issue is the overall too large utilization of the network and the large backlog of required maintenance of the rail infrastructure (in my opinion).

> It's all about speed and convenience, not luxury.

I don’t think this is necessarily true. Gran class seats on a shinkansen are some of the fanciest I’ve seen. It’s not quite like a first class airliner, but I think that’s more related to the shorter journeys.

A lie flat like an airliner has limited value on a train that is at most five hours between Tokyo and Fukuoka.

It would probably be more luxurious to put in private train compartments, which already exist on Japanese trains, but not on Shinkansen due to a capacity crunch.

Railroads have nearly universally lost money on the dining car. In the 1880s they did it because it was a loss leader - people choose the train (vs carriage) for the nice meals - something they could do that the other travel options could not (it isn't clear if this made a difference but they thought it did).

Station meals make far more sense in general - there is a lot more space to work with. You can also put multiple options (rent space to different restaurants) in a station. The only downside of this is you need enough flex so that people can get off when hungry eat and get on a different train (meaning both empty seats for them and multiple train options). Still trains have different economics from airplanes and should attempt to run no more than 70% full.

Japanese ekiben split the difference since they are all take out boxes; and there are some pretty luxe ekiben.

I think hardly anyone would get off a train in order to eat, then get on a following train. At least in places like Japan and Europe, where a typical long journey is just a few hours.

It would mean arriving an hour (or more) later at the destination. It's usually preferable to eat at the destination, or make do with eating on the train (in a dining car, snacks sold on-board, or something purchased at the station or brought from home).

japan is small and europe doesn't do cross border rail well. I could see doing it onia boston to chicago trip (you have to get off in ny anyway) though really it only makes sense for trips where flying makes sense.

The German Railway company DB often works with well known chefs who have also worked for aviation, often for Lufthansa, so they can benefit a bit from their experience.

The UK had dining cars on many of its long-distance trains, and they've been slowly phased out over the last decades. Two main causes:

Firstly, it's very difficult to make it profitable, given the limited number of passengers you can serve on a relatively short journey, the staff costs of running a kitchen plus waiting staff for ~10 tables and the limited price you can charge before the reputation of the train company starts to take a hit for "excessively expensive food".

Secondly, British trains on popular routes are now overfull. Capacity is bounded by trains/hour (fixed), maximum train length (fixed, by signal block and platform lengths), and capacity per coach. So we're optimising for the latter: thin seats to maximise density and a loss of luggage vans, kitchens, extra toilets, and other facilities that take up space but don't seat passengers.

The modern standard is a catering trolley that serves coffee and snacks at your seat. Because it lives in the aisle and moves, it doesn't take up revenue space. Because it mostly sells coffee and alcohol, it turns over a lot more per hour with only one staff member.

It’s worth noting that most of these dining cars in speech are detachable, and as such the operator decides which train service it should be added to. For example in Poland, not all intercity services have dining cars. This allows to strategically increase the profitability of services where dining car is expected to be popular.

I’d imagine that high-speed services operating the integral trainsets do not offer this flexibility, so they’d naturally opt for maxing-out seat capacity.

Also worth noting that just recently the European Sleeper, a new contender on the EU rail map, introduced a dining car with an interesting fix-prix approach to menu. I suppose they estimated they could make it profitable, but notably, they too only offer it on some of the services only. The reviews on YouTube seem to praise the quality and overall experience. I personally think that night trains in particular will see the dining cars a necessity.

Polish trains can have some really excellent dining cars. We take the Warsaw to Berlin regularly and they have fresh cooked food like friend eggs for breakfast, or breaded cutlet. Shorter distance trains have the standard snack bar.

The longest train journey possible in the Netherlands would be about 4 hours. People would rather just eat something at the train station. Besides train are as packed as a Tokyo subway.