Here’s a dinner menu with the same date, March 1956, as yesterday’s lunch menu. This one is obviously marked for the Kansas City Zephyr instead of the Nebraska Zephyr, but I wouldn’t be surprised if all of the zephyrs during that time period had similar menu offerings along with similar menu covers.
Click image to download an 892-KB PDF of this menu.
Someone traveling on, say, the Twin Zephyr from Minneapolis to Chicago and then the Kansas City Zephyr from Chicago to Kansas City might be annoyed at being confronted by the same menu on both trains. Burlington’s commissary changed the menu every month, so dining car officials probably reasoned that, since it offered four different entrées on the lunch menus and six on the dinner menus, someone would have to ride quite a few trains in a single month before they would have to eat the same meal twice.
My main complaint about the entrées on this menu — catfish saute, calf’s liver, baked duckling, prime rib, sirloin steak, and eggs Benedict — are that they appear on both the a la carte and table d’hôte sides, meaning one is merely derivative of the other rather than an enhancement. Aside from this, the wide range of entrées, plus four salads and six desserts, would have been sure to please any appetite in 1956 when vegan and similar diets were unheard of.
Not to mention Keto.
Noticeably absent is any mention of beer, wine, or cocktails being available. UP and SP menus of the same era (and probably Santa Fe too) all encouraged the purchase of same (“Wine adds to your enjoyment! Special Southern Pacific bottling” would be one example). Perhaps this was a “profit center” that mitigated the dining car losses to some small extent?