London DO
 

It's always fun to see SkiAdcock, and a DO presided over by
her was even more enticing, but I in fact have been busy and
am quite behindhand owing to a number of DOs in short order;
the tradeoff was have fun now and suffer later, or the
reverse. I'm not sure exactly what tipped the scales in favor
of my doing this trip: perhaps it was the appeal of seeing
friends whom I hadn't seen in years or others whom I hadn't
seen in weeks; or maybe it was the L34 of loose change
(figured it out later) that had been sitting in my drawer
since my ill-fated '06 trip.

UA 535 BOS ORD 1121 1310 752 2D Ch9^ Empower^

Lynne and Annie at the RCC, which had pathetic pickings
for snacks. The only thing worth eating was the Ghirardelli
caramel-filled squares at the front desk.

Bunches of people at the gate. They were accepting VDBs, but
as I had promised two FTers access to the RCC I didn't put
in for one. As it turns out, this was an exceptionally fine
flight.

Warm nuts and hot towels, the nuts including about 50%
macadamias.

De Bortoli Shiraz 08 - bright, cherryish, very little
concentration, a quaffing wine; I was used to drinking this
by the cask (for about AUD 5) when down under. Whatever;
it's drinkable. The genial (perhaps too jolly) FA said that
he had empty glass phobia, so I ended up quaffing altogether
too much of this stuff, viff glashes, I thiknkk.

The offerings were a turkey sandwich or shrimp salad; as I
am not passionate pro or con either, I allowed it to be
galley's choice: I was surprised to get a salad. This was
four medium shrimp (three snapping fresh, one sort of
strangely bitter, as if marinated in embalming fluid), a
couple asparagus tips, and a handful of cashews over good
fresh greens. Asian sesame dressing. Breads: whole grain or
regular rolls; the amusingly fey FA pulled a moue when I
refused both.

Ch9 wasn't on until I asked for it.

Given the essentially no-calorie nature of my lunch, the
chocolate-chip cookie was especially welcome. The wine went
okay with this.

Eventually hooked up with ordogg and msordogg (I was at the
Incomparable RCC; they were at the one right by their gate,
and it took a phone call or two and a sprint down the tunnel
to effect a rendezvous); this took place, and the sponsoring
thing took place; we were all quite willingly given a pair
of coupons apiece, some of which were used thus: ordogg had
a Campari soda with lime; madame had a J. Roget extra dry
American champagne, which was foxy and way too sweet but
otherwise ?okay; and I had a glass of some unidentifiable
red plonk that, after a hit of pepper on the back of the
throat, resolved into, well, something not unlike what you'd
get in a box. The flight was called, and the ordoggs excused
themselves. I thought of getting on their flight, which was
C9, but I had a dinner appointment with an old buddy. So I
sat around for a while and then wandered off to the Andiamo
across the way. Roger and I had met there a couple times
when I'd had a long layover, and for a progressive thinking
type he's remarkably habit bound and told me he'd rather
meet there. Anyhow, the food is reliable there, in an okay
sort of way, or so I thought.

He was early, and when I bumbled out to the restaurant, he
was pacing out front ... the restaurant was kind of quiet
at 6 (no weather delays yet), but still, service was slow
and kind of incompetent (though friendly enough).

I ordered the strip steak extra rare. Came as a filet, which
would have been okay, except I don't care for filet. So I
sent it back: the sirloin came medium. By this time it was
getting on, and Roger had half finished his meal, so I caved
and ate the steak anyway. Back to the airport, where
security was fairly fast and painless, and then to the RCC,
where I encountered jason6812, and we had a pleasant chat,
watching as our flight got more and more delayed, then a
stroll to the gate, where we found the cordellis, grateful
that our flight was late, as their feeder had been as well.

Nice report, made me hungry though. Guess if I wasn't ready this right before dinner it wouldn't have been a problem. :)

Since the next post describes airline food, you probably won't be
hungry after you read it even if it's before dinner!

UA 938 ORD LHR 2105 1105 763 7J Ch9^

We boarded leisurely, with interruptions; turns out there
were a few mechanical issues to deal with. By the time we
were ready to pull back, it had begun to snow, so we had to
get in line to deice, and so I figure we took off a good
hour and half late.

This was my first experience with the lie-flat business
arrangement. It's not, to my mind, a significant improvement
over the older C seat, in which I sleep like a baby. I'd
been hoping for something as nice as the old F suite; no
such luck. One good thing is regular 110V plugs instead of
that Empower stuff.

The AVOD is pretty good, but navigating it is annoying, and
the Airshow isn't as nice as it once was.

On today's flight, we offer selections designed by our
culinary team under the guidance of United Airlines
Executive Chef Gerry Gulli, as well as a choice designed
by internationally acclaimed Chef Charlie Trotter.

to begin
Shrimp, prosciutto and vegetable crudite with tahini
lime sauce

This was 1 shrimp, a curl of decent ham, some desiccated
plant matter, and a tolerable but superfluous sauce.

Fresh seasonal greens; Ranch or Asian sesame ginger
dressing

Okay; the greens were actually sort of fresh.

main course
T Grilled bacon wrapped strip loin; with red wine
braised cabbage and roasted rosemary potatoes

I had this in the hope that United could put out a better
steak than the Hilton. It didn't. The meat came tongue-
burning hot even in the middle and tasting almost
exclusively of bacon. The sides were uninteresting.

Pecan-crusted chicken breast with chunky pomodoro sauce;
rice pilaf with caramelized shallots and zucchini with
squash medley

Cheese tortellacci

Express Dine: Today's Express Dine features an
appetizer, a fresh entree salad topped with spicy scallops
served with Asian sesame ginger dressing and Eli's Key Lime
Cheesecake for dessert. This is a complete meal served all
at once at the time of your choosing, so you can maximize
your time on board.

dessert
International cheese selection; San Joaquin Gold,
Le Cabrie

Eli's Key Lime Cheesecake

I passed on dessert.

prior to arrival
Continental breakfast featuring a fruit appetizer, yogurt,
breakfast bread and fruit preserves

T Item designed especially for United Airlines by
Charlie Trotter.
We apologize if occasionally your choice is not available.

featured wines
Sparkling Wine
Mumm Cuvee Napa Brut NV Napa Valley
Iron Horse Brut 2003 Green Valley

White Wine
Simi Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc 2006 Sonoma County
Laboure-Roi Abbaye de Fontenay 2007 Montagny (Chardonnay)
Lockwood Vineyard Chardonnay 2007 Monterey
Firestone Vineyard Select Chardonnay 2007 Central Coast

Red Wine
Firestone Vineyard Select Merlot 2005 Central Coast
Andean Vineyards Malbec 2007 Mendoza
"L" de Lyeth Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 Sonoma
Solterra Vineyards Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2007
Colchagua Valley

2/08
ORD-LHR (LD63-C69) XD 211C022-1

I stuck with Courvoisier.

Woke up to the 30 minute warning. Passed on breakfast, even
though the very helpful FA offered to get me one.

Adding insult to injury, not only did we show up an hour and
half late, our gate wasn't ready, so we sat there another
10 or 15 - I'm guessing while a gate crew was rustled up.

There wasn't a fast lane open, but the regular immigration
took just a few minutes, thankfully, but by this time, there
was little chance of getting to town by any means in time
for the Spies and Spycatchers thing, so I just took the tube
to my hotel. A big wait at Earls Court for the one-stop spur
to Kensington Olympia - would have been quicker to walk.

You missed out on the Labouré-Roi Montagny, which is quite drinkable and not as unmemorable as many UA French white burgundies. The "L" is also not too bad, if you like Cabernet (I prefer other grapes).

Thanks. I've tasted L de Lyeth and found it overripe and not true to my
idea of Cabernet (which actually is a grape I generally like).

Hilton London Olympia hotel

My room wasn't ready, so I waited at the bar; decided to
have a Staropramen, as henceforth I would probably be
drinking local product. This is a quite malty, light,
moderately hopped Pilsener, fairly pleasant to drink. It
seems to have infiltrated the whole city. As it turns out,
it's now under control of Anheuser-Busch.

The genial check-in guy told me he was giving me a nice room
- and so it seemed, although it was really tiny. It was
clean and smelled okay, so I dropped my gear and took the
bus to Ye Grapes, where the FT party was in full swing. I
had a Henry's IPA, which was a travesty of the style - a
really weak, sweetish, dull beer. The company was much
better. For the second round I had something more
palatable, something from Greene King I think (chatting
with KMA62, melville, lili, jason6812, tom911, and others
was of higher priority than savoring the beer). SkiAdcock
announced departure in 5 minutes several times - the FT
equivalent of "last and final boarding call."

Cafe Lazeez is a jolly mile or so walk through Piccadilly
from Ye Grapes. We wended our way through the Valentine's
day crowd and were welcomed politely to a nearly empty
restaurant. The twenty-odd of us were set up at a long
table: my neighbors were techgirl, Alysia, timid_trnchcoat,
jason8612, and redbeard911; I ordered for some of us, and
t_t ordered for some others of us, but mostly it was catch
as catch can. The wine, a Chenin Blanc from the Loire,
however, was not shared around much, confining its travels
to our corner. It was melony and peary and did the job.

Duck samosas were nice crunchy fried things, the interior
not particularly identifiable - it could have been possum
or hedgehog or beef for all one could tell; papadums were
also nice crunchy fried things and much cheaper. These
latter came with fairly standard dipping sauces - a raita, a
chutney, and some coriander thing that was too mild to take
notice of.

Dal makhni was the pulse of the day; t_t pointed out that
makhni just meant that it was made with butter, and it was
very buttery indeed.

Butter chicken was also buttery, nicely seasoned, rather
mild, not as tomato-red as some versions I've had. Good.

There was no consensus on the hotness of the lamb bhuna,
of which several orders appeared on the table. Some of us
found it not hot enough, others found it at the edge of
their spice tolerance. There was agreement that it was
good, though.

Eggplant (baingan bharta) was excellent.

Okra (ladyfingers) with onions found less universal favor,
though techgirl and I ate copiously of it. I thought the
addition of onions toasted to a near but not quite burn made
it into an exceptional dish, but perhaps one must have spent
a while in the southland to be a true enthusiast for the
vegetable, whose detractors call it mucus pod, slimebag,
snotweed, and similar opprobrious epithets.

The fragrant basmati was a touch soft for my taste.

Our end of the table ended up with a bit too much food and
sent some down the way. I don't know how the rest of the
table fared in general.

I pulled out a box of Sweet Sloops to pass around. These are
the signature product of the Harbor Sweets company, which is
in one of my home towns, and over the years I have pushed
it whenever I can.

The Lindt balls subsequently provided by the restaurant were
a bit of a muchness.

Happy satiated goodbyes. I didn't feel like socializing but
headed back to the Hilton by degrees by myself.

I eventually wandered back slightly unsteadily to the room
and instantly fell asleep. Was wakened at 2 by the minibar
fridge making hideous noises. At this point I discovered as
well that the bed was severely short sheeted, and that my
legs and feet had been resting directly on the mattress.
So I called downstairs. No answer. Went there in person and
demanded the duty manager and a new room, both forthcoming
within half an hour, by which time I was quite cranky and
quite awake.

The room was intrinsically noisier but lacked a percussion
section, so I accepted it, despite the mildewy duvet. This
Hilton doesn't seem to be quite ready for prime time.

One thing the hotel has going for it is the full English,
which is abundant enough to fuel one for the whole day and
decent enough that one might want to eat that much. I of
course made my whole meal of bacon and black pudding and
felt enormously logy; a long walk helped that situation.

As the Jubilee and Victoria lines were under repair, I took
a variety of public modalities and got to the Tate just
about on time. KMA26 was there, shortly to be joined by
Melville and later, lili, Alysia, and timid_trnchcoat.

Tate Britain is one of my favorites, with its amazing
collection of Turners and a fine assortment of Europeans
from the Renaissance on. The first thing we encountered,
though, was a side-by side of mystics William Blake and
his supposed 20th-century counterpart Cecil Collins. Well,
I can't see it. The artlessness, in a not so good sense, of
the latter shone out next to the sublimity of Blake.

My choice was somewhat redeemed by the other rooms, and
even though many of the Turners were off on tour, we saw
a good selection. Boy, was that Fuseli guy a nutter.

Melville and KMA26 had to leave to accomplish their
hotel-hopping, but the rest of us had Sunday roast at the
White Swan up the bridge road ... what can I say: beer
good, roast boil-in-bag. Quite a disappointment, but at
least we had our roast and Yorkshire.

Alysia went off to the Cathedral or the Abbey or both, and
the remaining musketeers headed for the National Portrait
Gallery, where lili highly recommended the Taylor Wessing
Photographic Portrait Prize exhibit - as she said, the
featured work, Bag by Hendrik Kerstens, was a stunning
photo of a stunning young woman wearing plastic garbage
bags in the manner of a white Dutch bonnet. The other
entries were a mixed bag, as it were. Somewhere in the
crush, we lost timid_trenchcoat; after a look-around we
decided he must have gone off to find his cousin, which was
a possiblity he had alerted us to.

lili and I saw our fill of portraits, helped along by a
Polish student of art history who was working as a guard;
when we thanked her, she said that we had kept her from
dying of boredom.

After this, we took a quick jaunt across the street to
Crypt, which lili had found fascinating on a previous
visit; it seems over the years to have gone from an
over-the-top (as it were) upscale experience to a tame-ish
place where young parents can enjoy some measure of urban
chic while tending their stroller-bound offspring.

As we're a bit older, our tolerance for two-dimensional
inanimate objects is high, so we spent an hour at the
National Gallery looking at Titians and things, and then it
was on to Conway House and the well-regarded young Badke
Quartet, three young women and a lucky cellist, all recent
graduates of the Royal Academy and now serving as faculty
there. We arrived a tiny bit early despite my having taken
lili on a wild goose chase all through Bloomsbury trying
to find the hall. We were shortly joined by Alysia, and then
by t_t, whom we had somehow lost earlier in the day.

It was a good program; I was a little disappointed by the
first piece, the Haydn quartet "with the celebrated largo,"
so called because that movement not only is very pretty but
also is written in, I seem to recall, F sharp, a notoriously
difficult key for string players. This iteration was a bit
slapdash, and I figure most of the groups I've played in
could have done at least as well: that I know the upper 3
parts about as well as my name didn't help, as every tiny
transgression of theirs was noted. Razoumovsky #3 was a
rousing and expert performance, probably better than the
best one I've given of the piece; and they made easy work of
the Schumann "Clara" quartet, which I've heard world-famous
groups founder on, and which I'd never have dared to perform
even were I thirty years younger. What they'd done was clear
- skimped on rehearsal time for the Haydn, as it was a
relative piece of cake, then worked the others to a good
polish. A good deal, all in all, for the 7 or 8 quid a head.

We looked in vain for a restaurant still open in the area,
but finding All Bar One, Kingsway, where we ordered a couple
bottles of the house Shiraz and asked for a food menu. Sold
out of the Shiraz, and the kitchen was closed. Oh, well. I
had a Fuller's London Pride (I think Alysia did as well) and
a Courvoisier and tasted a Pinotage (beyond mediocre) and
then a Tempranillo that was decent but not decent enough to
catch the name of. t_t spent much of his drinking time
trying to track down his cousin, who eventually found us
just in time to see the place close down. Back to the hotel
for a decent night's sleep in the slightly mildewy bed, then
a shower in the slightly mildewy bathroom. Note to self:
spend ten quid a night more for a better Hilton next time.

Breakfast with lili, then a hike to Earl's Court, then the
hour tube ride to the airport. Sir Easy gave me my boarding
passes in a few seconds; clearing security and exit stuff
was a snap, with the guard insisting that I go to the fast
lane, even though the slow one was not substantially slower.

UA 949 LHR ORD 1205 1521 763 6J Ch9:td:

Only a few minutes to the * lounge, where KMA26 was waiting
for his sponsor. We went in to find that the wireless wasn't
working - I went to the front desk, where a pleasant LH
attendant gave me the password for the first class
wireless, which also was out. There was an adequate
breakfast spread, croissants and Danish and bacon butties
and the like. There was the scent of curry in the air, so I
guess perhaps lunch was close at hand (yet so far). I had a
Remy. Alysia came by, and soon after, mikew99 + 1 found us.
A nice little visit, and then our flight was called.

Terminal 1, by the way, is almost as depressing as in the
olden days; it's been only modestly spiffed up; the gate
area is nice and airy, though. As we got there while red
carpet boarding was going on, I didn't stop to soak up
the atmosphere.

A good crew and a pretty snappy-looking, clean aircraft.

to begin
Salmon ballotine with tabbouleh salad; lemon aioli

Fresh seasonal greens; Creamy Parmesan and Peppercorn
or Honey Dijon Vinaigrette

The ballotine was a salmon roll-up. I'd expected a round cut
from a carefully stuffed fish skin or something. Not really.

main course
Grilled filet mignon with roasted tomato Hollandaise sauce;
garlic and chive mashed potatoes with mixed vegetables

Mozzarella stuffed chicken breast with balsamic jus;
polenta with spring onions and haricots vert

Indian curry; sweet corn and bean tikka, cashew and
caraway rice, spicy potatoes

The main was a really, really good broad bean thing, fairly
spicy. The corn and bean dish was fine (though similar but
I think with tomatoes), and the rice was fine, though I am
not particularly a caraway person, but the potatoes were
awol. I do know that they existed somewhere, as I saw a full
tray with potatoes included heading out back to parts
unknown [cough] after the meal service.

dessert
International cheese selection; Stilton, Roubillac

European specialty dessert

Dessert was the oh-so specialty strawberry mousse cake; I
passed.

prior to arrival
Afternoon Tea Service; your selected entree will be
served with warm scones, clotted cream and fruit preserves

Trio of tea sandwiches and cranberry Wensleydale cheese;
salmon, prawn and crab
chicken and bacon
Ploughman's

Cheese plate with fresh seasonal fruit
Wensleydale with cranberries, Red Leicester

The scone was warm and good. The clotted cream, Rodda's, was
fine. The sandwiches were made fresh yesterday, not too
soggy, and quite all right. Not so good as the bacon butty
in the lounge, though.

Today's menu features beef from South America.
We apologize if occasionally your choice is not available.

2/08
LHR-ORD (LD63-S67) 211C021-1

[wines were as above]

Sitting backward was not a problem, I found to my surprise.

We came in quite early, and as immigration and customs were
a snap, I got to the domestic terminal in time to ascertain
that 882 had checked in full in F, so I went back to the
Incomparable RCC, where I was sold too many tequilas by the
very cute bartender and then her successor. In the meantime
spiff had PMed me inviting me for a drink at some superior
club, but I didn't get the message until it was time for my
next flight.

UA 538 ORD BOS 1736 2052 752 2D Ch9^ Empower:td:

An expeditious flight. Loaded expeditiously, efficient cabin
crew, landed a bit early as I recall.

Very hot nuts, painfully hot towels.

The meal was a roast beef plate or three cheese shells (or
three-cheese shells?). The beef thing was okay, the roll on
the side (I didn't have one). I sort of picked at the meal,
having eaten and drunk copiously the last couple days.

And back to reality, or what passes for it these days.

-33-

Violist - just saw your tr 4 months (inexcusably) later - we had a nice time meeting up, ended up u/g on 928 using miles on a S bucket fare^

Had the CT beef - quite possibly the worse C meal I ever had. Keep up the TR, they make me hungry!