CE catering - BA542 (LHR-BLQ 1445)

I think that it had been pretty clearly concluded that it was only MAD that has been moved from Medium to Long recently - last Saturday’s flight confirmed that BLQ is still definitely Medium as we were ceremonially treated to three small sandwiches each.

In the interests of research I ordered a Muslim meal and MrsPZE went for ovo-lacto vegetarian. MiniPZE was on standard meal having had some bad experiences of kids’ meals in the past.

We were in row 5 (of 5). The trip started a bit eccentrically when the CSM brought my meal straight out of the galley immediately after the hot towels. I must have looked confused because he then said “actually, shall I put it to one side and bring it out with main service? I just wanted to make sure it didn’t accidentally get served to someone else.” - and then it disappeared again. Similar conversation with MrsPZE although without actually presenting the meal and then confiscating it.

Service was actually pretty fast, I think I was reunited with my special meal within 10 minutes.

Onto the food itself:

As usual (based on other reports), not enough ploughmanses were loaded. They ran out in 4F so only just missed them. They looked very nice and quite a respectable amount of food for the time of day.

Standard sandwiches were as previously reported: try not to breathe in when they arrive in case you inhale them by mistake.

Muslim meal was a bit of a surprise... two egg and chive sandwiches and something that looked like a ham sandwich.


It also smelt and tasted like a ham sandwich, only with a spicy tikka-style dressing. I still can’t work out what it was but best guess is some kind of turkey ham dyed pink (that or the Muslim meal supplier has gone badly wrong).




Vegetarian meal was three very pleasant sandwiches with some mixture of grilled Mediterranean vegetables, tomato and pesto in various combinations. They appeared to be vegan, slightly confusingly OLV meal was the only one with no egg sandwiches... it was the tastiest combination out of standard, Muslim and vegetarian by some way, so would probably opt for that in future.




A few observations in no particular order

• on a flight of this length at this time of day it seems fair enough to not serve a “proper” meal but the afternoon tea really lacks any sense of luxury. The cake was a perfectly nice piece of lemon, polenta and olive oil cake (possibly) but no better than I’ve recently had in Y on other European SH flights including BA Cityflyer. For free. Even bringing back scones would make it feel slightly special.
• I asked the crew what the special meals contained and they didn’t know, which is why the tikka-ham mystery remains unsolved. They said it was embarrassing that they could never get information on special meals and understandably people ask what they are eating. Not the crew’s fault but a bit of a service failing from a BA perspective.
• the Muslim meal was a major disappointment compared with the example given in post 813 although to be fair it was up to the (extremely low) standard of the other options.
• Given all the bashing the SH CE product receives, it was interesting that MrsPZE was really impressed with the overall flight experience - the combination of blocked middle seat and decent crew proactively offering drinks was of far more interest than the nature of the food and she felt it worth quite a premium over Y. Seems worth noting given how much mental anguish we all devote to the downgrading/upgrading/slight changing of catering that to someone who flies less frequently CE can seem pretty luxurious (of course this perception might change if the flight spanned a “proper” mealtime from an outstation with no lounge food and the onboard offering was half a prawn and three rocket leaves).