The boat to the train was 10 minutes late, then 15, then 20. Whatever excitement I felt that morning for the trip — an overnight journey on the legendary Venice Simplon-Orient-Express (VSOE), a Belmond Train, from Venice to Brussels — was dissolving faster than an unrequited love letter discarded in the Grand Canal. In place of the anticipation, stress crystallized like frost on a winter window as I imagined the VSOE’s no-doubt punctual conductor departing Santa Lucia Station, leaving one passenger behind, and his bucket-list voyage un-kicked.
Christened in 1883, the VSOE was a celebrity-on-wheels long before Agatha Christie set her whodunit onboard, but that novel and its subsequent retellings, “Murder on the Orient Express,” has fixed the train in the travel consciousness. This longevity testifies to humanity’s era-agnostic wanderlust — we’ve always wanted to visit faraway lands — and the lost art of getting from A to B in a slow, impeccable, unreasonable style. A jet-black, three-button, Italian wool suit waited in my suitcase. Would it ever be worn?
A Fashionably Late Arrival
When my cabin steward, Melissa, asked if she could pour the Champagne, “YES” ran out of my mouth before she could finish the question. Despite the harrowing vaporetto from my Venice hotel to the station — the previous passengers being picked up were late — I made it with enough time to see the VSOE dapperly uniformed staff lined up outside the royal-blue train, smiling like actors on the red carpet at a movie premiere. And actors they are, according to manager Pascal Deyrolle. “We are not in the railway business, we are not in hospitality,” he told me. “We are in show business.” He should know. He was one of them, starting onboard as a cabins steward in 1992.
You ride the Orient Express, which came under the Belmond name in 2014, to be a part of this living theater. It’s a show lubricated by small talk with interesting international strangers, live piano music, and what feels like enough Veuve Cliquot to finance a law degree. A chilled bottle waited in my suite, a gleaming rosewood box with a blue velvet sofa, wet bar, marble bathroom, and table set for two with the bubbly, fresh fruit, and intricate canapés. Melissa poured, then sent me to lunch, whisking away my suit to steam out its wrinkles.
A Restaurant on Wheels
One hundred and eight guests are divided between Historic Twins, Suites, and Grand Suites (renovated in 2023), and a new addition for 2025, the crème-de-la-crème, carriage-length L’Observatoire suite. In each cabin, a notecard that looks as expensive as a wedding invitation provides the where and when of each passenger’s dining reservation. Three different restaurant cars live on the back of the train, and you cycle through them during your journey, dining on recipes from Parisian chef Jean Imbert in opulent Art Deco compartments of green (L’Etoile du Nord), gold (L’Oriental), and peacock-blue (Cote d’Azur). Wearing immaculate white jackets, the Italian servers sauced elegant dishes tableside (emerald watercress emulsion for a poached egg nested in woodsy roasted mushrooms; profound chicken jus for herby stuffed guinea fowl and sweet potato gnocchi), combed the tablecloths for crumbs between every course — I got a bit carried away with the incredible sourdough bread service, which included black-garlic butter stamped with the VSOE insignia — and kept the Champagne tap open.
Lake Garda filled the widescreen windows as a deconstructed pear crumble appeared, slouching in a what resembled a pewter chalice, and after scraping it clean, I retired to my suite. Meticulously pressed, my suite hung in the wardrobe. I spent the afternoon writing; I wish I could say postcards or memoirs or a murder mystery of my own, rather than a piece on the migrating hawks of New Jersey and the birders that love them. Melissa rang with coffee in silver service. Outside, northern Italy rolled by in carousel of vineyards and lakeshore and steeples, and by sundown, the train raced across the Simplon Pass into Switzerland, my signal to dress for dinner.
A Cast of Characters
A West End doyenne. Nouveau-riche honeymooners. A professional poker player. Heir to a hotel fortune. An antiquities professor and his “researcher.” A breeder of Best-in-Show Dachshunds. They all arrived promptly for pre-dinner cocktails in Bar Car 3674, perching on the chaises upholstered in zebra-pattered sapphire velvet to the backdrop of a piano serenade. I couldn’t identify these passengers for certain, but that was hardly the point. Until you get chatting — and you will eventually get chatting, such is the camaraderie the gels in the presence of liquor, luxury, and irresistible excitement of just being here — everyone is a character in an overnight play.
This may be the most expensive theater you’ll attend. Overnight trips in 2025 start at 3,885 GBP (around $ 5,000), all-inclusive with the exceptions of gratuities, caviar service, wine by the bottle, and cocktails like the bittersweet Guilty 12, a proprietary elixir of ingredients sourced, per the Bar Car 3674 drinks menu, from the various stops of the VSOE’s premiere journey between Istanbul and Paris (from 17,500 GBP/$22,880). That literary route still runs twice a year, calling at Bucharest, Budapest, and Sinaia, in the mystical mountains of Romania, though most passengers travel the one-nighters: Prague to Paris, Amsterdam to Venice, Geneva to Innsbruck, etc.
After dinner (luscious lobster Thermidor, an exquisite selection from a roaming cheese tray), many passengers returned to the bar cart to carouse deep into the night. Allegedly there’s a midnight brunch buffet, but with the emotional anticipation and elation running at 11 all day, I was exhausted and retreated to the suite, where Melissa had converted the sofa into a bed. Like faraway thunder, the low steady rumble of the train rocked me to sleep, and I awoke the next day in the Netherlands to a cappuccino and a basket of croissants. The VSOE drifted into Brussels Central Station, and I regrettably disembarked with my fellow players, having been transported between cities, sure, but more memorably, to another time.