Food and Meals
There is a center kitchen on each train, located next to the soft sleeping berth cars to supply 3 meals a day for hundreds of passenger on the entire train. Attached to this kitchen, there is a restaurant with seating for 40-50 passengers with wide windows as a favorite place for travelers to enjoy breakfast, lunch or dinner while enjoying the beautiful scenery along the Qinghai – Tibet Railway. Compared with the narrow sleeping berth compartment, the restaurant car is a comfortable place to relax and watch the incredible landscape pass by outside. Outside of having a meal there, you will be required to at least buy a beer or a cup of tea to sit there, otherwise you will be required to move back to your compartment.
In addition to the dining car, boxed lunches will be brought to each car by a small food cart. These are only Chinese-style fast food such as rice, fried vegetables and fried pork, and they normally cost around 20 Chinese Yuan (CNY) each. Food on the train is twice as expensive as you will normally find in the cities and the quality is not nearly as good.
For breakfast, passengers will be served with pickles, eggs, bread and milk, costing just 10 CNY per serving and these meals contain balanced nutrients. People who prefer noodles can choose from snow vegetable noodles, beef noodles, steak noodles, etc.
Tibetan style dishes are the most popular with passengers. Among all 45 dishes, there are 5 cold dishes, 8 Tibetan dishes, 32 ordinary dishes and 8 soup dishes. Examples include stewed yak with crassulaceae for 25 CNY, turnip, carrots and yak for 28 CNY and a ginseng salad for 18 CNY.
Decent Chinese food is served in the dining carriage.
Tasty box meal put by staff is availbe at meals in the train.
a sample of box meal in the train, at 25 Yuan
Snack trolley is also availble in the train and you can get things like dried beef, peanut, etc.
In short, passengers willl have many choices as to the food served in the Qinghai-Tibet train. If you have a long ride, you may also bring your own snacks or favourite furit and share them with your roommates, which is a good way to break the ice with new cabin mates.