Originally Posted by
Peachy6
Is the food that bad? I wouldn't know because I don't eat in airplanes.
They suffer from excessive fancyfication. The food is not bad. There are other carriers with worse food. But, this is my main gripe about the food:
- The menu says there is a meat dish with fancy name sauce and vegetables treated in obscure ways, with potatoes done up with spectacular methods, endorsed by a chef with a name you can't spell if told the name of.
- On your dish there will be a overcooked piece of ${meat} with a bland sauce that is chock full of salt and sugars, with a small smattering og veggies that have been steamed on the ground, reheated in the air, potentially already luke warm because business cabins are getting bigger, galleys smaller and crew fewer and serving times longer. The potatoes will be either boiled og baked in some manner, possibly pan fried. All in all a meal you would not pay 20 USD for on the ground.
It isn't 5 star by any stretch of the imagination. A lot of money goes into the menus trying to tell you it's fancy stuff, and it's meals that do not transpose well into being delivered by mass catering and airplane galleys. The 787 and 350 are excellent airplanes, real nice with QR's seats, but they are not your favourite brasserie. Don't try to convince me otherwise by the fancy talk in the menu.
How to improve it? Look at Asian carriers, their native cuisine lends itself to very simple dishes that packs a lot of flavour and has well known names and nothing fancy to them. Most of the ingredients are cheap, even.
Are there parts of the menu that does work on QR? Sure. Mezze, almost always a hit. Some of the soups. The berries in the dessert section (even better if I could get them would cold double cream and not the sugary water).
Other places the money could be better spent? The current champagne being served is vile. It is there because the menu has to have a champagne for image/political reasons, but drinking it is awful. That is a waste of money, either chop it alltogether, or add the spend to make it enjoyable. Just having something on the menu to be able to tick a check box is just not taking your customer seriously.
-A