racekp

Can confirm PE meals are single tray for all courses and yes hot meals are tinfoil covered same as Y but in crockery plate/dish. This was on the 787 HNL route

The addition is the 'warm' bread which they serve from a basket.

Thai-Kiwi

AKL-TPE NZ77 PE 21 Dec 2023

mad_atta

Foil on top of PE meals is a nasty step down. On the other hand (and more importantly), based on this thread it does look like the quality of the premium cabin on the whole seems to be up somewhat.

VERY impressed to see Coleraine being served onboard!

WLG Base

15 January 2024

Menu

Amuse-bouche

2015 Coleraine

Prosciutto

Lamb

2019 Cloudy Bay Pinot Noir

Double chocolate ice-cream

Thai-Kiwi

WLG Base A much nicer looking meal service than the meagre breakfast offerings when departing AKL to MEL/SYD/BNE in J

cavemanzk

Agree! The breakfast cut off for the East Coast Tasman flights should be 9am. In fact that would mean they would need no short Tasman J breakfast menu.

I always thought those 3 departures ex AKL should be lunch flights. By the time your half way across the Tasman, at the speed of NZ’s meal service in J it’s almost lunch time in Auckland.

Surely the majority of the pax have already had breakfast in the lounge?

I feel sorry for the connecting transit passengers… Breakfast on arrival into AKL, Breakfast in the Lounge, then breakfast on the flight to Australia.

mad_atta

Interesting to see the trend of some much more premium wines on offer, even in trans-Tasman J. Is this a short-term promotion or a more lasting shift, I wonder?

I was on NZ104 SYD-AKL yesterday in BP, and was impressed by the sheer number of wines on offer and, for the most part, the quality:

• Laurent Perrier NV champagne
• Two Rivers Convergence sauvignon blanc
• Astrolabe pinot gris
• Lawson's Dry Hills riesling
• Cloudy Bay chardonnay 2018
• Giesen Organic pinot noir
• Villa Maria Ngakirikiri cabernet sauvignon 2020.

I assume there was also a dessert wine onboard but I didn't see what that was, plus port of course. The Ngakirikiri is a $150 bottle, and I must say it was delicious.



Menu generally was decent, though there was no sign of the amuse bouche (we got a tiny ramekin of nuts instead, which rather oddly were served on their own rather than with a drink as usual). First drinks in the air were served with the appetisers.



I had the Puhoi goat's cheese mousse (which I forgot to take a photo of, but was pretty tasty and a nice lighter option), then the pan-fried snapper, followed by cheese and then the coconut mango mousse. Service was a bit disjointed and FAs seemed a bit more inexperienced than usual for the BP cabin, but they were friendly. We departed well over an hour late due to late inbound from AKL (medical emergency apparently) followed by an annoyingly slow turn in SYD (apparently the scheduled cleaning crew missed their window, so that added to the delay). This brought my international to domestic connection time down to about 48 minutes, but the purser did come by proactively with a list of all the connecting pax, and assured me that there were 10 passengers on board connecting to the same BHE flight (last of the day) and which gave me confidence they wouldn't go without us. As it is, I made it to domestic with enough time for a quick sojourn in the regional lounge.





As a side note, I though the catering in the NZ SYD lounge seemed like it had maybe improved a little - the cook to order dish was 'breakfast tacos' which at least is something a bit different.

mad_atta

One thing to add to my mini-update above: the one thing that really let the side down was the coffee, which was classic old-school airline coffee with very little flavour. I see on the menu it mentions that espresso based coffee is available on the 787s (which is good to see - I don't think I've ever had espresso on NZ flights so I'm not sure how new that is?), but is there any timeline for adding espresso makers to the 777 galleys? Seems the 77W will be with us for quite some time yet, and not having espresso based coffee in your longhaul J cabins is really subpar in 2024.

Rebound

I also had the Coleraine 2016 this time + the Ngakiriki back from Houston last week on NZ29. Great to see premium wines onboard.

edmm

Both were nice for "breakfast" on the way to Sydney too

Thai-Kiwi

Has the actual food component of the TT West-bound breakfast improved at all?

edmm

No, the frittata, the waffles and the bagel (no egg). Not too bad but no change.

mad_atta

I take back the comments I made last year about trans-Tasman works catering showing some signs of improvement - last night's NZ109 was woeful in quantity and lacklustre in quality. I had the lamb - can't actually remember the other options. The dish was smaller than my iPhone screen; any flavour was MIA; wine drinkable but dull (I had the pinot noir, couldn't see what it was) and arrived long after the food, despite being in row 2. The Kapiti ice cream could have been the saving grace but was half melted by the time I got to it. Just very, very lacklustre.

[small couscous salad not shown... it's hidden under my bread roll]



Brightest point of the journey was the wine in AKL lounge. I didn't realise that the tended bar had some different wines to what is out in the self-service area - has that always been the case? In this case, a well-aged Peregrine pinot noir 2014 and a pretty tasty Mt Difficulty 2021. Both made for a welcome change.

bce1

Come back NZ all is forgiven......

I know this is the NZ forum. But a client booked me on 10 days of scenic flights bouncing around Australia on QF. So 4 TT sector and 8 domestic sectors.
Their 737 J is unbelievable subpar. This is the NZ food thread, so just posting that NZs PE food service is significantly superior to QFs domestic and TT J. NZs food on a bad day is still better than QF J. My last two NZ economy meals TT were better.
It was really sad.

I take back all the mean things I have said about NZ.

mad_atta

NZ PE food... OK I could see that, arguably. But NZ TT economy meals better than QF J? That's a big call! And definitely not one which would reflect my experience. My QF J domestic and Tasman meals have not been amazing, but they haven't been bad. Which is not something I could say of my last NZ TT economy meal.

Can you tell us more? Why were they so bad? Was there really not a single flight of the 8 that was OK?