Each week, my Meal of the Week feature examines an airline meal from my travels over the years. This may be a meal from earlier in the week or it may be a meal served over a decade ago.
This week’s Meal of the Week centers on an incredibly γευστικός (tasty) breakfast I enjoyed on Aegean from Athens to Frankfurt.
The flight occurred in 2017: my family had just wrapped up a great trip to Greece and were flying from ATH to FRA to catch a flight back to the West Coast. As with all international flights on Aegean, a complimentary meal was served after takeoff. This flight left around 8:00 AM and thus a hot breakfast was offered to each passenger.
There was no choice. Each passenger was offered a tray containing an undisclosed wrapped item.
Upon pulling back the foil, I found baked feta cheese wrapped in filo and topped with sesame seeds. On the side was yogurt, honey, a piece of bread with butter and strawberry preserve, and a piece of chocolate.
WOW! WOW! This was a tasty breakfast. The combination of flavors was superb, rivaling that of the kanafeh I enjoyed aboard Middle East Airlines (a similar dish).
If you fly on Aegean in the morning out of Athens, you should hope that this is served – it is a wonderful, satisfying breakfast.
I should add here that I so appreciate the consistently kind and professional service on Aegean, another great reason to fly this airline.
I also once flew (as the only pax) in C ATH-OSL on the morning flight., and was impressed with the food and service from the smiling (both very pretty) flight hostesses, who had me smiling as well for the whole trip 🙂
I’ll stipulate the FAs are ubiquitously beautiful.
Yes, it’s a tasty dish. I don’t ‘get’ Aegean’s strategy, though. They are the defacto national carrier and yet seem to remain entirely focused on short haul, leaving Athens sadly short of intercontinental flights.
One can understand some reticence to expand quickly, especially in the light of the demise of Olympic. But have have nothing larger than the A321-200 and, it seems, no acquisition plans. New routes 2019 are strictly regional: Valencia, Sarajevo, Tunis.
It’s a pity they don’t try something a bit bold: a Bangkok service to link with Thai flights to Australia ( after all, Melbourne has the largest Greek population outside Greece) or to Canada, or even the US.
They are profitable, seem to be well-managed; the passenger experience is good , but one only gets to fly them on very short ‘boutique’ sectors.
100% agree. I hope longhaul service will arrive one day.
First, you have to bite or break the cheese pie so we can see what it looks like inside Matthew, what is this, amateur night at the Apollo?
Second, I am not too impressed, the cheese pie looks dry, the bread stale and not very tasty, probably the yogurt is the best part, but hardly a great breakfast by Greek standards (or any standards).
Yeah, I’m sorry about not having a picture of the inside. No idea why I did not take one. Still, it was so tasty I wanted to write about it.
Please don’t write in another language again I thought my phone was having a seizure
Ha! It’s the first time and may be the last. But I love the Greek characters.
As much as I dislike feta, that does look good.
So good!
While I always try to fly Aegean, over the likes of British Airways when flying from Heathrow to Athens, as generally Aegean’s service is much better than BA, I do find that their evening offerings are quite often quite mediocre. Think pasta/orzo with a tomato sauce, with what feels like a teaspoon if sauce and just plain pasta.
My wife and I have been served those meals a couple of times when flying back and forth from Munich to the Greek isles during the German 4 day weekends. We don’t find them to be that good. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
Fairly clear Why Snr Cruz’ lies about “very, very, very few seats in Europe with catering / refreshments” make British Airways BestAvoided given their fares are higher and yet they still charge even for water… Agean don’t offer a luxury service but neither do they simply screw their customer base and fail to deliver the product as sold.