I can't say I've eaten many great meals at in-terminal restaurants either. They also tend to be mediocre compared to things out in the real world.

I've only been to the Hawksworth restaurant once, and I remember the burger being pretty good but not as good as I had been led to expect by the YVR-based friend who sent me there. I will say that I remember being happier with the one in the YYZ SS in 2019 than the one in YVR today.

So I can't judge the quality of the restaurant based on the food they actually served me? That makes no sense. They chose to put a burger on the menu, and they could have done it a lot better than they did.

I have no idea how it tasted. And I suspect the menu is different than when you were last there. My comment is that it had a powerful odour that was very unpleasant, probably not just to those who don't like fish, but also to the many people who think that "not too fishy" is a compliment to a fish dish (Jim Gaffigan has a great bit on this in one of his specials). My wife - who's a lot less sensitive to this than me - didn't like it either, and I saw more than a couple of people who looked not to be enjoying it either.

They both serve food. In fact, they both serve burgers with cheese and bacon. Since you and I don't live far from each other, I will happily buy you lunch at Earls sometime and you can see that they actually do a pretty good burger (this is a serious offer).

Our experiences are very different then. When I was last in an SS in February (YYZ), the beef tenderloin was good, as was the squash soup, but some of the other food wasn't, and the cacio e pepe was "[t]he worst [...] I have ever had, anywhere. By far. Embarrassing." And I stand by that. Whoever made that dish had zero understanding of what a cacio e pepe was, and if I had been in a real restaurant, I would have sent it back in a heartbeat. I would also have sent back that watery, flavourless old fashioned today.

In contrast, I've never had a spectacular meal at an Earls or Cactus Club, but I've never really had a bad one either. Their scale allows them to build a system to deliver a certain consistency of experience that might make it hard to do something exceptional, but also generally ensures that a certain minimum is hit.

The SS seems to be trying to deliver a fine dining-like experience, but with a number of constraints that make that difficult - they have to operate within an airport, which imposes certain operational limitations, e.g. everyone and everything has to go through security, knives are chained down, the kitchen probably isn't very big, etc.. The restaurant business doesn't necessarily pay very well, but I suspect that between whatever wages AC offers and the lack of prestige associated with working at a Suite (many talented young people will take poor wages to work in fancy restaurants because doing so helps them build their skills and their resumes), they're probably not attracting the best talent in the industry. They're also running only two restaurants, and not particularly large ones, so they don't have a lot of economies of scale. And while AC is clearly spending more on meals for Signature customers than the broken tortilla chips etc in the MLL, they're probably not spending a huge amount of extra cash. Top that all off with a need to turn things out quickly because everyone has a flight to catch and most people don't have 5-hour layovers to dine at a languid pace.

So it's a challenging environment to deliver an upscale dining experience. And I acknowledge I've had a couple of good things there. But I've also had a number of things that weren't very good. So they're not delivering quality consistently, and it doesn't give me any desire to spend extra money to fly AC.