The flight had a departure time of 19:45 so I wasn't entirely in the mood to eat dinner and a snack would have been better. The choices were fajita chicken salad or meatballs. I had the meatballs SEA>MKE a few weeks ago and was interested in comparing catering stations. Compared to the other flight, the salad was better because even though it wasn't shaved, the parmesan was of higher quality. The meatballs and marinara were roughly equal. I love spinach but it ruined it for me on this dish as it overpowered everything else because of sort of a canned or meh quality to it. Everything else was better on the JFK flight, bread was crispier, it looked better overall, etc. Just that spinach was no bueno.

Flight overall was good. FEBO was practiced and we got a PDB. The lead FA was clearly a NY'er and treated it like a cattle call during boarding and with announcements. But 1:1 she was very good and attentive.

As to the champagne discussion, this is basically mostly all on DL. They are trying to right-size the catering but my last 4 D1 trips have run out, been out or nearly run out of champagne. My last 3 VS flights they had champagne overboard. If you get 4 people drinking it out of 30, they are going to run out of the 1 bottle they seem to cater. And when they got none catered, then they should have a back-up brand because, in my case, I'm sure there are other brands of true Champagne ex-PVG. There may be some staff training issue, but the amount and type catered is setting the FA's up for failure.