When I boarded an Air India flight to Delhi, a flight attendant, her long-lashed eyes and bunned hair of the same darkened luster, joined her palms before her chest, lowered her eyelids halfway, canted her head, and bowed ever-so-slightly. “Namaste,” she said with a smile. She wore what must have been a sari, with a kind of sash wound diagonally around her left shoulder so that a portion of her midriff below it was showing. There was something beautiful and feminine about that subtle display of her body’s curves. A kind of understated, delicate femininity; an exotic femininity.

I took my seat and soon the plane zoomed down the runway and then shot into the sky. After we had gained enough altitude a different stewardess, this one with large oval eyes, the flesh in her midriff showing in plump rolls, asked me if I would like some food.

I wasn't especially hungry. I thought I could wait until I’m out of this winged cylinder hurtling through the skies before trying something new to eat. I also remembered how inevitably disappointing airplane food always was, like a more elaborate only-add-boiling-water instant meal that never satisfied.

“Actually,” I began to say, but as the no from no thank you formed on my lips—the attendant blinking, waiting for me to respond—the aroma of basmati rice besprinkled with cumin seeds and a ghee-infused curry reached my nostrils.

“You know what,” I said, “sure.”

“Certainly,” she said, with a light sideways dip of the head, and handed me the tray.

Foil peeled back, fork wielded, I bit in. I was smitten. The flavors—sweet and spicy and sour—that had just struck my tongue, the firmness of the rice and richness of the creamy curry that came packing a pungent punch… these spices opened up a vast panoramic spectrum of flavors, stretching beyond what my palate had conceived possible…

I took another bite, and another one, and soon I was wrestling with the disposable aluminum packaging, fishing out single grains of rice from corrugated corners, thinking how silly I must have looked and hoping no one was watching me. This was only one dish of the many cuisines I would be sampling in India. And it’s airplane food, I thought with a smile. Airplane food.

What maverick discovered that if all of these flavors are combined food becomes so excellent, ecstatic, electric? What yogic powers were harnessed to unveil such delectability?

I laughed to myself. The passenger next to me turned to see what was going on with me. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, shake her, and say, “Are you having this?! And we haven’t even arrived yet!”

Instead, I waited for the attendant to come around again. “Excuse me!” I said when she did.

“Yes?” she raised a painted eyebrow.

“Do you think… do you think…” I gave a shy smile. “Do you think I could have some more?”

She smiled a wry smile. “I’m afraid not,” she said, “food is over.”

How can you find the cheapest food at an airport?

Answer:

Pertaining only to Indian airports. Play nice with the staff of the airport and they will take you to the worker’s canteen.

Let us for a moment realize that all Indian airports have a work force staff of around 1000 people, working in a day. All these 1000 people do not eat at KFC, McD and Subway’s at the airport. So where do these people eat?

They have an airport canteen.

Is it accessible to all? Yes. The airport canteen is open to all airport staff, passengers and non airport people, CISF, police personnel, custom officials etc.,.

What is the catch? The catch is finding out where it is and going there.

Some airports, like the one in Delhi, have canteens located inside the airport premises, here it gets difficult to access them without ID cards. However if you play nice some of the airport staff might help you get in, grab a quick bite and get out.

For Mumbai Airport, there is an MIA canteen located just outside the domestic airport. All you need to do before entering the airport take the left or see the left. It is easy to spot and it is open to all. They provide parcel too. So you can take away a plate of Bhel puri or Pav Bhaji and munch on them after check in.

So the best way to find the cheapest food in airport is to follow the staff or ask the CISF, airhostess/ground staff nicely.

It was… well, it was a bagel. I’ll explain. This was quite a while ago, in the Detroit airport I think. And I should explain that when I travel, I don’t usually eat until everything is situated and settled, I’m at my gate, they aren’t boarding yet, I have time and everything is ok. Sometimes they don’t and I go hungry for a while, but I would rather board my flight hungry than miss it to buy a cheeseburger.

Anyway, I settled in and I started looking around. There was this Big Apple Bagel place, and I thought that was a reasonably cheap safe possibility. I mean, if they gave me a plain bagel and a cup of coffee, that would have been fine. So, I step up, and I am immediately impressed. I could see them dressing bagels, the line was clean and tidy, the prices were reasonable, and the line was short. The food going out looked quite good! So, I sort of rolled the dice and ordered a cream cheese bagel with smoked salmon on an onion bagel. (See, so good I remember it 30 years later!) It was about as good as a bagel could get. They dressed it with some capers, it looked good, it could have been brought to a table at a fine restaurant. And it was devine. I started taking smaller and smaller bites so I could get every bit of flavor and texture it could give me. And the coffee was decent too.

Something like that, on the concourse of an airport, was totally unexpected and totally memorable.

You can buy good cheese, various kinds of salami, and olives in almost any city today. You can buy these the day before, even, and they don't require refrigeration. A baguette or crackers go nicely. Even airplane wine can taste good with these. For dessert, cookies or macaroons generally hold up better than pastries.

In Paris, I've bought foie gras and caviar for flights, but buy it in s glass jar, not a tin which security might take away. Dommage. Again crackers will do the job, but dark bread might be better.

Bring some plastic utensils and extra napkins. If you're flying internationally, you might not be able to bring any leftover food into the arrival country, so enjoy it all or share it.

Your seat mates will be quite jealous and you're sure to make great friends if you bring some extras.

Your own food and an iPad with your favorite movies or tv series and the flight will go by in no time. First class, eat your heart out!

I do not remember the menu of that particular flight but can share my experience.

I was flying with Air India from Dubai International to Kolkata via New Delhi IGI in December 2011 for my Christmas vacation. The flight was just after midnight local time and I boarded the flight. It was on time and departed as usual. Actually that was my first flight with Air India and had known about a lot of negative sides of AI from people. I wanted a first hand experience with AI. I was happy with the way things were happening then. It was meal time. They served us dinner(late night). It was a mix of Indian and middle east menu. Food was delicious and fresh. Quality was good. The cutlery were not very attractive compared to Emirates or Qatar Airways. I liked the food. The best was the dessert which was served. It was rasgulla with kesar flavour.

The next flight from IGI to Kolkata at around 5 am was also on time.

The breakfast served in the flight was very very nice with very good choice and mixture of Indian cuisine. The food, service and ontime arrival and departure made me change my perspective towards the Air India from that time.

Over all my first flight with them was very enjoyable and food was great.

Many will not agree with me but I liked it.

I was in the airport in Maine (Portland?) and I had a little time, so I treated myself to a sit down lunch (not a tear-ass through the airport, ineffectually wiping food off my face while my wheelie bag careened behind me). I had a lobster roll—impeccably fresh lobster, touch of mayo on a buttered New England roll with potato chips and a Diet Coke.

Happy, happy, happy.

The best food I’ve had at an airport was from Sushi Taka at Hong Kong National Airport. It’s supposed to be the sister restaurant of a Michelin Star sushi restaurant in Japan. I didn’t think the airport version was Michelin Star worthy but it was definitely a step above most sushi restaurants you find in the US.

I bought the premium nigiri set and a bowl of Udon. It was a pleasant surprise that they put uni and toro pieces in the nigiri set and the udon tasted like udon so no complaints from me.

I bring my own food because plane food is gross. I used to be a flight attendant and we did everything we could to avoid it. Some tips:

• Check the rules of the country you are going to before packing. You can bring very little fresh stuff into Hawaii, Australia, or California. Watch out for cheese-sniffing dogs!
• If possible, pack protein, fruit, and vegetables. You can usually supplement with crackers, bread, muffins etc from on the plane or in the airport. Nuts and dried fruit are small and provide lots of energy.
• As someone already mentioned, no liquids any more

It's easy to get sick with the recycled air, global germs, and lack of sleep. Feed your body well and you might stay healthy on your trip!

As someone from the USA I suppose when you think “international” you think ‘long flights’. Here in Europe some of our ‘international’ flights last less than 45 minutes, so I’m going to interpret your question as “intercontinental”.

Anyway, the best ‘snack’ you can have on any long flight (or any flight for that matter) is water, and plenty of it. Cabin air is extremely dry and you will dehydrate very quickly. If you become dehydrated you risk headaches, not being able to rest well, and worsened effects of jet lag, amongst other unpleasant symptoms. So, keep a big bottle of water by your side, sip it regularly, and if you have to go to the toilet just that bit more often than usual… well, less chance of DVT, so there’s another benefit for free!

It depends. By the time I get to my departure airport, I’ve usually already had breakfast or lunch. I may buy a latte, but not food. If I’m on a muti-leg flight, I often don’t have time to get food unless the laover is long. I’m from hte USA. In US airports, I don’t usually bother because the food all tends to be the same. McDonalds, Burger King, Dunkin, Starbucks. Other than New Orleans and perhaps two or three others, there’s rarely any sort of regional food, and if so, it’s usually pretty expensive. I usually bring some snacks - a bag or two of pistachios maybe some trail mix. and eat that instead.

I did have a delicious reindeer sausage on a layover in Helsinki, however.

When I was ten years old in the summer of 1964 I had a memorable day out with my father and our friends on a coach outing from our village in the Nottinghamshire countryside in central England. The previous year I had my first ever visit to London, and now it was time for me to visit London Heathrow Airport. I was not going to fly anywhere, because in those days many of us regarded flying as something that only the richer people or upper classes did. (In fact, my first flight was with the long gone British Midland Airways from East Midlands Airport to Paris in May 1980, when I was 26 years old, and my father never flew in an aircraft.) No, I and my father in 1964 were only going to have a guided tour of the airport and “see how the other half lives” so to speak, and in particular the other half who went flying in those days.

In those days every little boy like me was very interested in all of the developments that were taking place in the world of aviation. I used to read as much as I could about modern aircraft, and was fascinated by the cut away pictures in the “Eagle” comic depicting the workings of modern technology, especially when these featured aircraft. I also had started to assemble plastic Airfix models of aircraft, like many boys did at that time. I also had an ambition that one day I would be a test pilot and be the first man to fly these modern aircraft, and I recall being so upset when following an eye test as part of a medical at school, my mother was told that I could never be a test pilot because I was colour blind. And of course little girls were fascinated by aviation as much as boys in those days, because many of the girls at my school wanted to have the most glamorous job in the world when they grew up – being what is known as a flight attendant now, but “an air hostess” in those days.

So naturally I was enthralled by my day at Heathrow Airport, back I those days before British Airways came into existence and instead there were the two British airlines of BEA, British European Airways and BOAC, British Overseas Airways Corporation. I recall seeing the different airlines, and a QANTAS flight taking off, easily distinguishable by the kangaroo motif of the aircraft tailplane. And among the Comets, Viscounts, Britannias and Boeing 707s that were the main airliners of those days, I was delighted to see the most state of the art modern airliner, namely a BOAC Vickers VC10 (pictured below).

When it was time to have lunch my father I visited what seemed a very smart and prestigious restaurant where we chose something listed on the menu as “Fried Chicken Americaine” (obviously American fried Chicken but with a fancy French spelling of American). And when it arrived, I thought it was the most delicious meal I had ever eaten in my ten year old life, and so appropriate to eat it on a day that was one of the biggest days of my life. I remembered the meal and the day out for a long time afterwards, but I never came across that delectable dish again in any other restaurant (at least not until many years later).

And then years later I rediscovered what I had eaten in that restaurant at Heathrow Airport as a child all of those years previously. I rediscovered it when I had my first Kentucky Fried Chicken meal, which must have been in about 1980, I guess. Actually the very first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in the U.K. opened in 1965 (in Preston), the year after I had that lunch at Heathrow Airport, but it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that the number of KFC restaurants began to increase and KFC became a meal that reached almost everyone here in the U.K.. (Pictured below is that first KFC restaurant in those days, and as you can see it is next to a Wimpy Bar, where we all went to for hamburgers at that time because McDonalds had not arrived in the U.K. then.)

And so that delectable meal which I ate at London Heathrow Airport in 1964 and still rate as the best food I have ever eaten in an airport is nothing special nowadays, but is just a routine workaday meal now. And I suppose that a trip to an airport like my father and I had to Heathrow in 1964 would today for many of us who always go abroad for our holidays be like taking a trip to the local bus station, not to ride on any bus, but just to have a guided tour of the waiting room, cafeteria, newspaper kiosk and toilets.

Inflight catering companies prepare cooked meals to be heated in the galley of the plane by the airline’s inflight crew. One such company is SATS Ltd. the chief ground-handling and in-flight catering service provider at Singapore Changi Airport. They provide meals among other services for 20 airlines.

Our Customers - SATS

SATS provides gateway and food services in Asia; their food services comprise airline catering, food distribution and logistics, industrial catering as well as chilled and frozen food manufacturing, besides linen and laundry services.

“What are some of the most memorable meals you've ever had at an airport? What were you eating, and why was it so memorable?”

Airport meals are not usually memorable. I try not to get anything too unusual. That being said, I had a very tasty Chinese food meal in the Singapore Changi Airport. The place was more like a hole in the wall restaurant that you picked up your food on a tray. but the flavoring was superb. Later there was a long line of customers buying food there. The Anchor Bar Buffalo wings and beef on weck are both tasty at the Buffalo Niagara international Airport. I had this food growing up and the flavors take me back. I have had so-so sushi at LAX but the wasabi was bomb. It sent me into another state of consciousness. Lastly, I had some good (for me) conveyor belt sushi at the Haneda Airport in Tokyo. I was one of two early customers and had a chef making the sushi only for me after I pointed out what I wanted. The chef did a great job of making and flavoring the sushi.