Airline Food

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Chicken rice @ Korean Air

Unlike many other air travellers, I’ve usually found airline food pretty delicious. Maybe it’s this thing about eating in confined spaces, or just that you have a lot of different food items all crammed onto a small eating tray. I travelled between Perth and Singapore frequently over the Ph.D period, and the stuff served on Qantas was pretty good, and even ValuAir’s quite maligned fried rice in a styrofoam box didn’t taste any worse than those found in foodcourt fare. And Thai Airways, for me at least, has always served great food.

So there I was, thinking airline food could do no wrong, and boy was I proven how wrong – haha – that was when I flew Korean Air during our honeymoon last week. Ling chose the Pipimbab thinking how could it be possible that the locals prepare one of their national and signature dishes badly, and myself just so we had variety, the chicken rice set, and the beef set on the return journey. And that was the worse chicken rice I’ve tasted – ever. The rice was tasteless and hard. The chicken tasted like it had been fried, kept in the freezer, then re-microwaved – twice. The vegetable side was bitter – wow. Well, there was a small container of dark soya sauce that’s the thick kind we find at premium chicken rice servings in hotel restaurants, but that in itself was pointless without a tasty set of chicken rice to go along with it.

As for Ling’s Pipimbab, the less said the better. She’s usually a big fan of this stuff, but for the first time ever, she couldn’t even finish half the plate. She had a few mouthfuls, shook her head, and grimaced. My beef set on the return journey was slightly better, so I managed to feed Ling some of it just so she didn’t starve.

All this is more the irony because we had great food and ate well during the next 8 days of the trip in Korea itself, and the four flights we took mostly smooth and right on time. Both Ling and myself have got more than just a little fatter, and now are trying, rigorously, to work that additional weight off now in The Rivervale gym. But the stuff we got on Korean Air we found just terrible, and we had to suffer the same again on the return journey. Well, at least the honey-roasted peanuts they gave us were absolutely fabulous; so good that I’m contemplating having a review just for those peanuts! :)

  • Food: 3 / 10
  • Value: NA
  • Overall: 1.5 / 5. Next time we’ll make sure we eat a hearty meal before boarding a KE flight.