Aegean Airlines Stuns An Airborne Audience With This One Crazy Thing
The Aegean is a body of water in Greece. Any chickens in it probably got there by mistake.
Traveler, be not fooled. When you are flying business class on almost any airline today, you are paying for theatrics. Oh, a bigger seat and/or more space too, of course, but you are what you are really shelling out the big bucks or shedding the accumulate mileage for is to be dazzled. By seats that are maybe more comfortable than your own boring mattress. By, on some airlines endorsed by aging Spanish actresses, things that shouldn’t be on airplanes like showers. By menu ingredients that hold their own against latest hot stuff from, say, Borough Market.
The thing is, it rarely happens. Most people flying business are not even twenty percent as important as they think they are, and most are doing it for status. Some, in fact, probably “deserve” to be more exhausted than you do. (No, that doesn’t mean we’re voting Labour.) These are the kinds of people who, in the mistaken belief that they know what consitutes good taste, are inured to mediocrity.
Like the kind I recently experienced on a transatlantic flight from Los Angeles to London. I won’t name the airline, but let’s just say food served in a cabin that was not coach was meant to above par but turned out to be way below it.
So for a connecting flight I was prepared to be disappointed. It seems nobody cares enough about quality or flavor anymore. It is all about cutting costs, getting by with the minimum, and taking a piss on creativity in the process, and sometimes having to settle for a plateful of something that is fancifully described but actually amounts to a heap of overheated slop.
But, as it turns out, I was wrong. And sometimes, I really love to be incorrect.
That’s because I was flying Aegean Airlines, Business Class from London to Athens. I paid a bit extra for one of those “Upgrade Challenge” things. Not because the seats are that great — they aren’t — but because after a long haul flight things like fast track security and priority boarding keep you one step further away from total exhaustion.
Travel is more annoyance than adventure today. Did I mention that the evil geniuses at Heathrow Airport now make you for over five pounds just to get dropped off at Terminal Three? Bollocks to that. Welcome to the UK.
Or in my case, goodbye. Once aboard Aegean, I took one weary look at the “Gastronomics” menu, in which “our star chefs carefully curate the menu for each flight using the finest ingredients to bring you an authentic taste of Greece” and sighed. Would I be as disappointed as I had been in the recent past?
No, actually. And that’s because of the main course choice that was not chicken. (And Jesus to the Christ, are you not sick and tired of that banal word, chicken? At least let it be called poulet, in all languages!). It was fish.
Not the prosaic airplane salmon, all pink and rubbery.
It was sea bass. With lemon sauce, a couple spears of asparagus and artichoke flan.
A lovely, white flaky sea bass, two filets, skin on one side, light, delicate. A soupçon of salt and the sea. The faint perfume of ce zeste de citron, même.
It would be no exaggeration that the passengers who ordered the sea bass were in rapt attention.
I think I once saw black sea bass crop up on a menu served in Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class, but that was a long time ago. You don’t “sea” it very often these days, ya see?
Was I thrilled with the “tahini cake” by Stelios Parliaros? I don’t know, but it struck me as insufficiently fruity — a touch of citrus in a dessert served at high altitude would have gone a long way — so I skipped it.
But that lemony sea bass was a winner. Kudos to Aegean. Greek Column approved.
