Finnair
The second service, labelled "Before landing" on the menu, is a sad affair. There is no table cloth, well, actually there is no nothing. The menu says "vegetable quiche with shrimp and potato salad", but what you get in reality is a medium-sized tray with a minuscule, mushy and tasteless pie and a small side salad, on the bottom of which is some mayonnaise with potato cubes. No shrimp today. The tray looks empty and lacking and makes one wonder how hungry one will be after a potentially long wait at immigration and the slow transit to Manhattan.





SAS

Pre-landing: Smoked Greenland halibut with hazelnut cream, fennel and apple salad, pickled brow beech mushrooms and parsley cream on grainy rye bread.
Fresh fruit. Handmade pralines from Hedh Escalante.


Menu-wise it might look disappointing ;"A sandwich" for a meal.

In reality it isn't bad at all. On top of a Danish rye bread (very different from Finnish rye bread) is a apple/fennel sallad covered by a large portion of halibut. Well, if you don't eat fish then that won't make you happy but with that said - this isn't a fishy fish. And the condiments are good. And the portion is sizeable. I am not the biggest fan of mushrooms, but they were OK too and I finish the plate 100%.

While a sandwich isn't a full meal per se, considering the previous full dinner service - and considering the terrible sponge Finnair calls a quiche - this is a good second meal.

Yes, it is sadly a tray-meal, just like Finnair. But the similarities end there.


As a testament to the meal services being good on this SAS flight I should tell what happened after the flight. O'hare is under construction again, and immigration lines are long. I didn't clock it, but a guess it took at least 45 minutes getting landside. Then, partly from my poor research and partly from the ordered chaos that is US airports, I waited 2 hours on my airport shuttle (being passed up by 2 drivers)
Then it turned out shuttles wasn't even supposed to serve that terminal anyway, so I had to move to another terminal and find the right bay and wait another 15 minutes. Sure, I was angry, but not hangry. Only after checked in at the hotel, some 4 hours after the pre-landing meal I felt the urge to grab a bite. There is no way I would have handled that episode well if I'd been quiched by Finnair.