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