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.
Last week, I compared dinner in business class on American Airlines versus United Airlines. I’ve also recently flown both United and American on a morning transcontinental trip. Which carrier offers the better breakfast in business class?
Transcontinental Business Class Breakfast: American Airlines Vs. United Airlines
American Airlines Business Class Breakfast
My American Airlines flight from Los Angeles (LAX) to Miami (MIA) featured a printed menu and four breakfast choices:
- American breakfast
- scrambled eggs with chives, Canadian bacon, roasted potatoes, herb tomato
- Swiss cheese and roasted tomato omelet
- Italian chicken, sausage, seasoned potatoes, hollandaise sauce
- Bagel and lox
- New York bagel, Atlantic salmon lox, cream cheese, boiled egg, red onion, capers
- Coconut chia oatmeal
- Fresh berries, mango, toasted coconut, dried apricot
All courses included a seasonal fruit plate, biscuit or cinnamon roll, as well as grapes and cheese.
The meal was served wrapped, but cleaned up nicely and even included a parsley garnish for the omelet.
In terms of quantity, it was a massive amount of food. I typically request two breakfasts when I fly, but there was no no need here.
As beautiful as it looked, the omelet was a bit soggy and the cheese totally overwhelmed any taste of eggs or tomato. I wish I had ordered the American breakfast and will do so next time.
It was so nice to have fresh fruit and the cinnamon rolls were tasty (I ate them both) considering they were not warned up.
I particularly appreciated that the meal was served on real dishes, not plastic or disposable ones (though there was still a great deal of unnecessary plastic waste).
United Airlines Business Class Breakfast
My United flight from Newark (EWR) to Los Angeles (LAX) included a choice of buttermilk pancakes or huevos rancheros.
The eggs were scrambled with green peppers and a spicy red salsa (genuinely spicy) and served on top of a sope shell (thicker than a tortilla) with black beans on the side. This was an extremely tasty dish. Such a shame that one “Kirby Kutback” in late 2020 was the elimination of real fruit for a Dole fruit cup, which I find just nasty. Greek yogurt has also been replaced by a sugary yogurt from Upstate Farms.
I also had the pancakes, stuffed with blueberries + peaches and served with sausage on the side and pure maple syrup. I love stuffed pancakes and also found these very tasty.
Winner: Draw
Obviously American Airlines offers more choice and a heartier breakfast. I particularly appreciated the fresh fruit and fresh cinnamon rolls. But when it came to the main course, I thought the United egg dish was significantly better than what American Airlines offered.
If United would just bring back fresh fruit and a croissant or cinnamon roll, they would be the clear winner, at least in this round.
CONCLUSION
Both United and American offered a decent breakfast on select coast-to-coast flights. American Airlines offered more choice and quantity while I found the United Airlines main courses to be tastier.
Delta: Cheez-It, Biscoff and a small bottle of water, in a ziploc bag for safety. Oh wait, for transcons they get a “premium” snack box.
Loser: Delta
The flight attendants didn’t catch corona by serving something more than a bottle of water upon boarding did they?
Nope. Not behind their triple masks…
If going on looks and presentation, AA wins hands down.
Just spent a week on Delta, and have to say, their food offerings are BS. They obviously don’t care about “safety”, otherwise they wouldn’t be packing people into seats with only 20 inches of space between heads in coach.
Those little snack boxes in business/first are little more than a kid’s Lunchable from Safeway. They should be knocking off 30% of the price of a ticket for that. But they haven’t.
Don’t let them claim they are leaving middle seats empty. They aren’t. Every flight I was on was packed. Only first class leaves a seat open, but they still fill seats in rows, so you are never more than 3 feet away from another breathing human being.
The Delta Sky Lounges are similarly inconsistent. Considering jumping to American for my travel needs seeing at how poorly Delta considers its customer base.
“I typically request two breakfasts when I fly”
Not just breakfasts lol
My god, carb overload.
Matthew I’m rather confused. I just last week flew American air First class LAS to MIA and was served a bag with water, a cookie and sanitizer. Who is getting this great food? It wasn’t anyone in first class on a 4.5 hour flight LAS-MIA
Hi Teresa, currently AA serves full meals only on LAX-MIA plus LAX/SFO-JFK.
However, you should have been offered a cheese plate or sandwich on your LAS-MIA flight.
Alright Matthew, which is it, tapeworm or hollow leg ? I mean that purely in a friendly teasing sense of “an unusual capacity for eating whatever one likes without apparent concern for weight”. I get hungry and seem to gain 2 pounds just from reading some of your blog entries. You should enjoy it while you can, seems that most people get to an age or point in time when they have to be much more careful about their diet or risk gaining undesired unhealthy weight.
Believe it or not, when I am home I *usually* eat very healthy. Egg whites. Nonfat yogurt. Lean meat. Fish. Very few carbs. So I do tend to splurge a bit when in the air. Yes, my metabolism has not slowed down yet and for that I am thankful. I also park a mile away from LAX airport so that I can burn off calories before and after my trip (tough I usually treat myself to In-N-Out Burger as well). But will enjoy it while I can and I am trying to train myself to resist these splurges even in the air, because I know my body will thank me one day.
I’d find it hard to choose between either breakfasts of the respective carriers. Here in Australia, only Qantas 9as a full service carrier) offer a decent breakfast, but nothing as delicious as these meals! Virgin Australia is scaling down their food offerings, because they’re now marketing themselves as a “mid-market” carrier, which means you’d be lucky to get some cereal with a little fruit It’s a battlefield here in Oz…
Once again the airlines pander to the carnivores via all manner of hot treats, but assign borderline freak-food to vegetarians/vegans ( coconut chia oatmeal); half the world’s population eat hot plant-based food, and thrive on it, but it seems beyond the capability of these airlines to recognise this fact , and respond with decent food for them.
Folks, the days of “good airline food” are gone. They were actually gone well before the pandemic, but REALLY died during the pandemic (and, no, the SARS-CoV-2 virus wasn’t the cause of the demise of good airline food).
I have flown a lot of international travel over the past 8-10 years, and as much as possible, I flew foreign carriers. Most of the Asian carriers (such as EVA Air, Cathay Pacific, Asiana, Singapore, ANA, and several others, and some of the mid-East carriers like Qatar and Emirates) really had some delicious, beautifully presented food. Very elegant service with some great food. We’ll have to see in a year or so whether that resumes or is forever lost.
Domestic flights? Well, there is really no such thing as decent food. Actually, as noted above by many speakers, there really isn’t much food at all. Kind of sad.
EdSparks58