Battle of economy class aeroplane meals
Aeroplane food - they get a terrible rep, and so they should - at least that is still the case when it comes to economy class. Whilst the standard of food served onboard for business class and above have improved leaps and bounds (especially when certain airlines start to engage Michellin-starred chefs to design their menus and use that as a point of differentiation), economy class food remains the necessary evil one must endure in order to get from A to B.
Qantas Airways - Sydney to Shanghai
Let's start with the foccacia - great flavour, salty and fragrant, but unfortunately soggy. Nobody wants bread with napkin stuck to it, Qantas.
The main is a piece of pork in a tomato-based sauce, along with carrots and string beans. The pork had a strange artificial texture - it was almost melt in the mouth; but instead of enjoying the lack of need for vigorous chewing, I just felt slightly suspicious. The carbohydrate came in the form of Israeli cous cous with raisins tossed in. It felt a little over-moistured (as though one didn't properly strain the cous cous after cooking). The flavour was good, though. The tomato base is sufficiently and pleasantly salty-sweet.
The bread and butter pudding was relatively fine in flavour - it is slightly spiced like a Christmas pudding, and pleasantly so - but the proportion is all wrong. Nobody wants a tiny piece of cake drowning in a pool of artificial-tasting cream.
Dinner was Shepard's pie with some roast courgettes and onions. I found the dish bland - could have used more salt; though that could be due to the altitude. I have similar comments about the foccacia and the dessert. I'm not even sure what the dessert is supposed to be, but it just tasted like vegetable fat masquerading as cream. Nobody wants to have fatty residue on their palette during a flight, Qantas. Please reconsider your dessert menu.
One wonderful thing about Qantas, however, is that the staff will make you highballs - bloody mary; gin and tonic; ginger beer and vodka - and by "make you highballs" I mean give you a shot of liquor with a can of mixer. That means you can make your drink as strong-tasting as you'd like. They also offer mini bottles of wine - skip those, they are not fit for human drinking.
Lufthansa - Shanghai to London (operated by Air China)
The sickly, eerie pink lighting sums up how the food taste. Though I deeply love my home town of Shanghai, in my experience, if you fly out from China, the food is going to be safe to consume but decidedly questionable in taste - no matter the airline. I think the mistake I made is to go for the Western option; whereas I should really have gone for the Chinese version.
Just look at that weird blob of creamy disaster! I did enjoy the vegetables - cooked quite well; and if I ignore the blob and just add salt, it wasn't a bad tummy-filler.
Everything else on the tray was absolutely inedible. The bread was overly sweet yet dry; that "salad" is a thing of evil; and the pink cake is a weird jelly-cream abomination.
For my second meal, I learned from my mistake and picked the Chinese meal - such an improvement! The pork noodle with Chinese broccoli was actually pretty delicious! Granted, soy sauce makes everything taste normal and comforting, the dish was pleasantly savoury and I was thankful for it.
The "salad" was, again, highly suspect - I think it was bamboo shoot with sad peanuts tossed in for no good reason, and had the most disgustingly wrong can-food taste. Pass.
Rockmelon, at least, was recognisable. Not a good rockmelon, but a normal fruit nonetheless.
Lufthansa - Frankfurt - Shanghai
Lufthansa is now on flying from home ground, do you think it could do a better job than flying out of Shanghai? Nope. The meat was stringy and had a very strange artificial flavour, it really was rather off-putting.
The salad is every bit as depressing and flavourless as it looks; the same goes for the bread roll.
The only saving grace is the blueberry cheesecake, which is merely tolerable. The wafer stick is overly-sweet and a weird choice for an airline to offer - do you really want all these crumbs on your plane?
If dinner was disappointing, breakfast was frankly upsetting. The sausage is of ok flavour but looks all sorts of wrong. The green vegetable goo is like food for someone who just went through a colonoscopy. The bread was meh, the yogurt was fine. The least upsetting thing about my breakfast was a "virgin bloody mary" - I learned from this trip that the Europeans love it on flights - a tomato juice topped with salt and pepper. It sounded totally weird to me, but now I'm quite a fan.
Ranking
Qantas is without a doubt my number one - mainly for their service. Apart from the standard drinks and dinner service (I cannot stress enough how much the highballs won me over), they also serve peppermint tea, hot chocolate and little bags of pretzels.
Lufthansa was a huge disappointment, and experience had taught me to expect very, very little from Air China - it did pleasantly surprise me with the noodle dish, but everything else was a complete disaster.
Qantas Airways - Sydney to Shanghai
Let's start with the foccacia - great flavour, salty and fragrant, but unfortunately soggy. Nobody wants bread with napkin stuck to it, Qantas.
The main is a piece of pork in a tomato-based sauce, along with carrots and string beans. The pork had a strange artificial texture - it was almost melt in the mouth; but instead of enjoying the lack of need for vigorous chewing, I just felt slightly suspicious. The carbohydrate came in the form of Israeli cous cous with raisins tossed in. It felt a little over-moistured (as though one didn't properly strain the cous cous after cooking). The flavour was good, though. The tomato base is sufficiently and pleasantly salty-sweet.
The bread and butter pudding was relatively fine in flavour - it is slightly spiced like a Christmas pudding, and pleasantly so - but the proportion is all wrong. Nobody wants a tiny piece of cake drowning in a pool of artificial-tasting cream.
Dinner was Shepard's pie with some roast courgettes and onions. I found the dish bland - could have used more salt; though that could be due to the altitude. I have similar comments about the foccacia and the dessert. I'm not even sure what the dessert is supposed to be, but it just tasted like vegetable fat masquerading as cream. Nobody wants to have fatty residue on their palette during a flight, Qantas. Please reconsider your dessert menu.
One wonderful thing about Qantas, however, is that the staff will make you highballs - bloody mary; gin and tonic; ginger beer and vodka - and by "make you highballs" I mean give you a shot of liquor with a can of mixer. That means you can make your drink as strong-tasting as you'd like. They also offer mini bottles of wine - skip those, they are not fit for human drinking.
Lufthansa - Shanghai to London (operated by Air China)
The sickly, eerie pink lighting sums up how the food taste. Though I deeply love my home town of Shanghai, in my experience, if you fly out from China, the food is going to be safe to consume but decidedly questionable in taste - no matter the airline. I think the mistake I made is to go for the Western option; whereas I should really have gone for the Chinese version.
Just look at that weird blob of creamy disaster! I did enjoy the vegetables - cooked quite well; and if I ignore the blob and just add salt, it wasn't a bad tummy-filler.
Everything else on the tray was absolutely inedible. The bread was overly sweet yet dry; that "salad" is a thing of evil; and the pink cake is a weird jelly-cream abomination.
For my second meal, I learned from my mistake and picked the Chinese meal - such an improvement! The pork noodle with Chinese broccoli was actually pretty delicious! Granted, soy sauce makes everything taste normal and comforting, the dish was pleasantly savoury and I was thankful for it.
The "salad" was, again, highly suspect - I think it was bamboo shoot with sad peanuts tossed in for no good reason, and had the most disgustingly wrong can-food taste. Pass.
Rockmelon, at least, was recognisable. Not a good rockmelon, but a normal fruit nonetheless.
Lufthansa - Frankfurt - Shanghai
Lufthansa is now on flying from home ground, do you think it could do a better job than flying out of Shanghai? Nope. The meat was stringy and had a very strange artificial flavour, it really was rather off-putting.
The salad is every bit as depressing and flavourless as it looks; the same goes for the bread roll.
The only saving grace is the blueberry cheesecake, which is merely tolerable. The wafer stick is overly-sweet and a weird choice for an airline to offer - do you really want all these crumbs on your plane?
If dinner was disappointing, breakfast was frankly upsetting. The sausage is of ok flavour but looks all sorts of wrong. The green vegetable goo is like food for someone who just went through a colonoscopy. The bread was meh, the yogurt was fine. The least upsetting thing about my breakfast was a "virgin bloody mary" - I learned from this trip that the Europeans love it on flights - a tomato juice topped with salt and pepper. It sounded totally weird to me, but now I'm quite a fan.
Ranking
Qantas is without a doubt my number one - mainly for their service. Apart from the standard drinks and dinner service (I cannot stress enough how much the highballs won me over), they also serve peppermint tea, hot chocolate and little bags of pretzels.
Lufthansa was a huge disappointment, and experience had taught me to expect very, very little from Air China - it did pleasantly surprise me with the noodle dish, but everything else was a complete disaster.
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