Rajdhani trains to experiment with new menu

New Delhi, Aug 1 (UNI) Instead of the mandatory but monotonous 'bread-butter-omlette-cutlet' that forms the breakfast menu in Rajdhani trains, you can now tingle your palate with delicious varieties of paratha -- pudina paratha, paneer paratha and ajwain (carom) paratha, to be exact -- and an assortment of soups.

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd (IRCTC) Managing Director P K Goyal said as part of measures to improve onboard catering services in Rajdhani trains, the new menu would be effective from today.

''Initially, it will be a cyclic menu. It will be valid for eight days and the menus for every day will be different,'' he said.

Till now, the Rajdhani trains had a fixed menu and no changes were made in the cuisines. ''Now efforts are being made that every day there would be different cuisines,'' he said, adding that this would break the monotony of a fixed menu and also improve taste.

IRCTC sources said if the menu for the first eight days received a positive response from travellers, a new menu for the next 15 days would be put in place. The new menu would include sweet corn soup, almond soup, butter paneer, paneer do pyaza, butter chicken, chicken do pyaza and fried rice.

To begin with, Mr Goyal said, the new cyclic menu for dinner had been introduced on the IRCTC-managed Howrah, Mumbai and August Kranti Rajdhani express trains with effect from today.

''It is proposed to make changes in the menu for other trains also in a phased manner,'' he said.

IRCTC has also introduced fresh set of uniforms for various categories of onboard staff for the Howrah, Mumbai and August Kranti Rajdhani trains, and uniforms for the other trains and units would follow shortly.

He said IRCTC would also be experimenting with the newly-designed electronic opinion poll for its catering services. ''It would welcome suggestions and feedback and also complaints with regard to the catering services, which can be sent on [email protected],'' he added.

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