A truly embarrassingly awful lacto-ovo vegetarian meal in F from London to Tokyo.
The flight attendant was apologetic. Her words were "It's going to be a lot of salad, but it's good salad."

The first canape was veg and humous, decent flavour. Not pictured is the second salad, which was a couple of different lettuce salads with feta. The third salad was chickpeas and sprouted vegetables that was actually quite tasty. Taken in isolation they were all quite decent. But three cold salads as a "fine dining" experience is just shameful. Trying to do the same theatrics as with the regular meal just drew even more attention to how crap it was.

Most egregious was the main course. It was penne pasta in a cold, tasteless cream sauce, with boiled unseasoned whole baby carrots and some boiled unseasoned broccoli. The flight attendant was embarrassed to serve it, I was embarrassed to be served it. I am sure it was the same meal for all classes.

Dessert was, you guessed it, another salad. I can't eat kiwi or pineapple and the melon was overripe mush, so I had a small slice of dragonfruit.

The ridiculous thing is that the a-la-carte menu has a lot of vegetarian and vegan options, one of which (spicy cheese toastie) I was able to try and it was very flavourful, although cold (very strange, as it was grilled, but it was as if it was grilled the day before). On F flights from Tokyo they also claim to have a gourmet menu.

Breakfast was supposed to be a bean cassoulet and omelette and it was described to me as such, but when it arrived it was something more like a traditional breakfast with an omelette, hash browns and mushrooms. No beans in sight. The omelette was stone cold and the hash browns close to raw.

I had read reviews and expected nothing. I was still disappointed. Would have been nice to have a hot meal on a fifteen hour flight in First Class.