When traveling on planes, it’s best to know the good, the bad and the ugly of food. Whether you’re stuck at an airport or on an airplane for several hours, it’s probably not the time to do a lot of gastronomical experimentation.
Recently, I was at Terminal C at BWI for the first time. The other terminals at Baltimore’s airport are well-appointed, but C — American Airlines’ terminal — seems more than half dead. Most of the restaurants seem to be permanently closed, including to my chagrin, Wendy’s. I did get a few tasty sliders at Bayside Landing with caramelized onions, but it annoyed me to have to spend around $15 for hamburgers. They do offer table service and a full bar.
Later, I took a British Airways flight both to and from Heathrow Airport to Italy. BA, though it has a video slide show touting its new “Height Cuisine,” threatens to keep the cliche’ about English food alive. They do say that their recipes have been specifically designed to use umami — the new savory taste sensation discovered in Japan. It’s most perceptible in foods like seaweed, mackerel, tomatoes and Parmesan cheese. To that end, and I don’t know if this is a traditional English drink or not, they offer tomato juice splashed with Lea and Perrins Worcester sauce. It’s not bad: the sauce gives the juice a more savory, beefy, umami flavor. It doesn’t taste like a Bloody Mary, either.
My first BA meal offered was chicken curry or tomato cheese pasta. I feel like the dishes were designed by someone who had never eaten on a plane or in any vehicle before. I would never design a menu for travel that involved little pieces that could go flying in a touch of turbulence or splashy sauces with a penchant for staining. I picked the chicken curry, because that seemed like archetypal British way of eating. The dish had rice, little cubes of chicken, with separate curry and tomato sauces that had to be mixed with a fork. It had a hint of spice, a floral curry and long grain rice.
British style, hot tea is offered before coffee. They pre-make the tea, instead of offering tea bags and hot water. Also, alcoholic drinks are complimentary, which is definitely something.
They also offer Highland Spring water, which is the high end water placed in the rooms at The Antrim in Taneytown, Maryland. It’s also what Olympians have been drinking in London.
In the morning, orange-lemon muffins were served, which was General Robert E. Lee’s favorite flavor of cake. No calories are listed on English packages.
Another set of meals on BA included a rather odd cheese sandwich with medium-thick slices of cheese and a sweet “pickle” that we would think of more as a fruit-onion chutney, as well as a tastier chicken with mushroom sauce that was served with what they called “mash” — mashed potatoes with scallion bits, as well as a cold couscous salad with parsley, lemon, red leaf lettuce, minced cucumbers and mint. It didn’t really relate to the chicken entree well and just came off like one starch too many. The dessert was new to me, “posset”. It’s an Irish delicacy of double cream and fruit puree. Think of it as the best part off the top of whole milk yogurt.
I must admit, I used to lump in Gordon Ramsay with the other — as City Paper’s Joe MacLeod would say — “teevee” chefs. I’ve had teevee chef fare before and it can be inconsistent or terribly overrated. I will further admit that it annoys me that Ramsay’s willing to share the small screen with Paula Deen. However, I give him kudos for getting Cafe’ Hon’s Denise Whiting to give up her ridiculous stranglehold on the term “hon,” provided it wasn’t a grand pr stunt to begin with.
Chef Ramsay has a restaurant at Heathrow where you pick how many courses you want by how much time you have to spend there or can get them to pack you up a box for the plane. In fact, the restaurant is called “Plane Food”. For about 13 British pounds, which, due to the crap state of the American dollar is about $22, you get a choice of 4 different items in each of 3 course categories. They pack it in a reusable, really neat temperature-proof pack. It’s available from 7:00 am to 9:00 pm and takes them about 10 minutes to put together.
The first course I selected was a Caesar. Quite frankly, I rarely order Caesar salads in restaurants for a couple of reasons. First, I make a great version and most restaurants can’t touch it. Second, I ate at the original Caesar’s in Tijuana, Mexico with my dad. The pageantry and flavors of salad made table-side is hard to beat. Chef Ramsay’s Caesar was the best I’ve ever had. The restaurant picks out the very most beautiful Romaine hearts, white anchovy, prosciutto, big shavings of Parmesan cheese, seasoned olive oil croutons and a perfectly soft-boiled egg. An egg yolk rich and garlicky dressing comes in its own plastic carafe.
I also selected roasted Hereford rump of beef with green bean salad and mustard. It was piles of rare roast beef with arugula, a couple of green beans and a very spicy horseradish mustard. The beef was tender and quite flavorful. The mustard was much hotter than I would have guessed, which you might want to be careful of when on a plane without access to extra fluids.
For a dessert course, I picked an English cheese plate with quince paste and “biscuits” (crackers). The quince was sweet and spicy. There was a sharper goat cheese round, a rich and spicy slice of blue cheese, aged Cheddar and a creamy (Camembert?) cheese. The goat cheese had a bit of pleasant “goatiness” that was more than tangy. The portions of the cheese were very generous and could be a light meal in themselves. The crackers served were thin wheat crackers and a “water” cracker. Water crackers are deliberately bland, as to not cover up the flavor of the cheese. When I was growing up, there was a family friend who insisted that if we went to the UK, we bring back water crackers. She ate them plain, which I thought (and still do think) was terribly weird. They’re kind of the corrugated cardboard of food.
Luxe & Down-Home Cuisine/Culture/Travel/Style 