Originally Posted by
JerryFF
I find it curious what people expect from airport restaurants. Maybe it is just that I have been conditioned into accepting lower restaurant standards at airports than elsewhere, but consider the following analogy.
If you went to a restaurant that had live background music, would you expect to hear Van Cliburn playing classical music or Tony Bennett or Paul McCartney singing? Could an average restaurant afford to pay a top musician?
Restaurants are very difficult businesses to run in general. There is little demand for a high quality dinner venue at an airport. Add those two together and a business person would have to think long and hard before opening up a good sit-down dinner restaurant at an airport. I'm not saying it couldn't ever work, but it certainly would be a very risky business venture.
I presume that this response was aimed at my observation that you couldn't get a decent sit down dinner at SFO - rather you had to eat "fuel" in a service station atmosphere. It's clearly correct to state you won't find the French Laundry, or any Michelin starred restaurant at an airport - completely out of place. But why not somewhere where you can sit down and eat a properly prepared meal without being jostled. Most airports in the world manage such a thing and SFO, with its bank of red-eyes leaving, is particularly suited to it.
I wonder what business people (not locals) do when they are taking a red-eye. For me, I leave the office at about 6 or 6:30. I've already checked out of the hotel so I have my bags with me and don't have a hotel room to go to. I don't want to eat until 7:30 or 8:00 at the earliest. There's not time to have a nice dinner in SF before I have to leave for the airport - and I don't drive after drinking, so I couldn't enjoy a glass of wine with it anyway. So the obvious thing to do is to go to the airport from the office and have dinner there, arriving say 7:30 and through security at 8:00. Perfect timing for a leisurely dinner. But the offerings at least in T3 and International G simply don't provide anything suitable. Trumped up fast food is what's on offer, not leisurely slow food.