Originally Posted by
hugolover
. Quality is perhaps more opinion and taste based than not but quantity can be measured in absolute terms. Such as the afternoon tea sandwiches taking up the space of the salad bar and stay in all evening. The lack of dessert on the menu.
This bit I can fully endorse. It's genuinely difficult to get a grip on the quality side: the vegetarian pies, the chicken mole and mac & cheese are subjectively as good as anything served in First Lounge since it opened. You may have preferred the Compass sandwiches, but I personally prefer about half of the BS range, moreover they've got a range of I think 12 fillings rotating around, and Compass had 4 which never rotated. It's still subjective.
Things have changed so much since Compass that it is very difficult to make a direct comparison, you have to stand back a bit and say "does a visit to the First lounge improve my flying experience today?" and "was it better under Compass?". I would answer yes to the first question without too much thought, and probably no to the second, but I'd hesitate a bit longer on that. If I had a choice between T5 Flounge and the fairly new T2 Senator lounge? After the third visit to Senator the novelty factor would wear off, the very limited food choices would grate, and I'd stick with Flounge. One big improvement with BaxterStorey is that their managers are umpteen times more approachable than Compass, their equivalents were based in some portacabin on the Northern Perimeter and were almost invisible in the lounges themselves.
On the other hand as mentioned up thread I personally wouldn't touch the burger (or even let my dogs eat them, [un]fortunately they are banned from the lounges). I can't actually remember some halcyon day when the burger was worth eating, it certainly used to be worse in the past. You are also correct that since they moved the sandwiches to the salad chiller, there are fewer salad options, but there again there are now the tapas items which are very popular in the evening. Desserts? Well that I have to say that really is a mystery. I mean to shove a big tray of apple crumble in the oven would be almost no work, almost zero cost, total crowd pleaser and as far as desserts go it's vaguely nutritious. There is the cake of course.....
How does one make sense of this? All I can say is that if you want to go back to the last days of Compass, there were plenty of people complaining about the lounge food then, particularly in CCR. Here are some rants from that period, and there are plenty, plenty more:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...quest-now.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trip-...-my-story.html