You would, but in practice they don’t. There’s often very limited stock considering how busy the Highlander lounge usually is; the intention is seemingly to be sold out of most items by 1am. I’ve sometimes heard team leaders apologising that they only carry two of each hot meal, but that was admittedly on midweek nights in low season. I like to think that that is not normal, particularly at this time of year.
Sometimes demand in the lounge can be quite unpredictable, particularly now that there is no option to pre-order a meal and the lounge is generally a free-for-all. Sometimes a lounge can be absolutely full but none of the customers want anything more than a cup of tea or a can of juice (as it was for the most part coming south from Inverness last week); at other times, the lounge can be half-full but everyone in there wants a hot dish. Demand for hot meals (for whatever reason) and the likelihood of running out of hot food always strikes me as being greater northbound out of Euston than southbound out of Inverness/Fort William on the Highlander in my experience, but perhaps my experiences aren’t that typical. Perhaps it is just too difficult to predict sales each night, and there are concerns about food wastage. It is for that reason, I think, that all breakfast items now have to be pre-ordered using the order cards. I seem to remember that for the first couple of years under Serco, a stock of bacon rolls was loaded at Edinburgh for the morning (for anyone who happened to be in the lounge and want them); now I believe that only pre-ordered items will be loaded onto the train.
