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.
Fish on an airplane is a paradox. It’s the dish most likely to spoil at some point in the supply chain process, but also the dish I find safest in terms of taste. How would the fish choice be in Finnair Business Class on an A350 flight from Helsinki to Beijing?
After takeoff, flight attendants offered a beverage service with an amuse bouche (fennel, apples, peas, whitefish, and caviar). I tired the signature cocktail, called Blue Sky, featuring blueberry liqueur and champagne. It was excellent…a great juxtaposition of sweet and tart tastes.
Flight time to Beijing is short…we were in the air for only about seven hours. While Finnair offers a more relaxed meal service on longer Asian routes, it offered a single-tray service on this 7-hour, 50-minute flight.
The starter contained slices of roast beef in tartar sauce with spinach and nutmeg.
For the main course, I chose pike-perch over beef neck or sweet and sour pork. Served with potatoes, asparagus, cauliflower, and zucchini, it was an excellent choice and proved light and delicious. I suspect that Finnair would have done all three dishes well and loved the garnishes.
The meal tray also included bread and a small green salad with radish arugula, and cucumber.
A cheese course included a selection of tasty Finnish cheeses.
Finally, dessert was Finnish organic ice cream: I tried both vanilla and licorice. The only downside to the entire flight: the cappuccino was powdered.
CONCLUSION
This trip was in 2017 and Finnair greatly exceeded my expectations. I look forward to trying Finnair again (though I still prefer this old seat to the new one that does not recline)
> Read My Full Review Of This Flight:
Maybe not, but these portions look tiny for a full meal. 1 asparagus? 2 fresh spinach leaves?
That Roast Beef looks worse than what I can only imagine Rosie O’Donnell’s snatch looks like at this point.
Thanks for enabling me to lose my appetite !
It was probably a horseradish sauce. It appears to have been a wonderful meal and I am so curious about the licorice ice cream.
Liked the signature cocktail but yet ‘tired’ of it ? …. !
… and anticlimactic powdered ‘crappuccino’ leaving a disappointing aftertaste to an otherwise excellent meal…
Nice post, just wanted to update you Matthew,
For the time being, Venezuela is not issuing visas to US “tourists”. It hasn’t been announced, but heard back from my contact. Supposedly there are workarounds if you are sponsored by someone with an important reason to visit, but has to be someone on the ground in Caracas who can “rush the process”.
For now, it seems that Venezuela is off the cards for you sadlY unless you take the other route. Take care.
Finnair is also one of the airlines that lets you preview your meal before the flight, so it gets points for tbat as well.
There aren’t many airlines that get fish right, in addition to Finnair, I could only name Singapore Airlines, Thai and Aegean. On any other airline, I wouldn’t eat it.