Love the Lounge, Submit to Snobbery

Any food associated with air-travel is generally assumed to be disgusting.  This includes both the slop they serve on the planes while in-flight AND the over-priced nonsense sold in the terminals.  You rarely get to chow down on anything enjoyable during your journey once you leave the comfort of your home/hotel and enter  the tasteless-wasteland that is the air-travel industry.

Yet I have found a few glimmers of hope that have been reveled to me during the some of my darkest travel hours. I have engineered creative ways to ‘upgrade’ in-flight food using simple ingredients, I have found an airline that actually serves decent snacks, and I have even managed to discover a surprisingly awesome restaurant hidden in an airport terminal. But I have a new positive find that must be shared….

Perfectly diced fruit salad in individual glass bowls were just one of the many little gems this perfect airport lounge offered.

I was catching a connecting flight in Frankfurt and had some time to spare. Due to my extreme frequent-flyer lifestyle, I am fortunate enough to often get upgrades which allow access to the exclusive airline ‘lounges’…So in Frankfurt, I was bored with the souvenir shops selling cheesy t-shirts and decided to check out the Lufthansa (Star Alliance) ‘Business Lounge.’ I have spent a LOT of time in these sort of lounges and have come to not really expect much. Usually they are packed with snooty business types and wealthy aristocrats who look down upon all us plain-clothes dressed ‘commoners. ‘ These ‘luxurious’ lounges are often just stocked with worn-out furniture, suffer a severe lack of conveniently located power outlets and the free food typically consists of stale snacks and rotten produce.

But when I entered this lounge I came across a BEAUTIFUL BUFFET, which I immediately attacked. It was  filled with fountains of fruit, plenty of beverage options, and enough cleverly chosen snacks to keep this picky eater happy. This was definitely a ‘Best Bite.’ While I have enjoyed far more elaborate buffets in various hotels, this was pretty damn impressive for an airport lounge!

THIS is an airport lounge worth getting exciting for. I just need to figure out how to get more connecting flights out of Frankfurt now…

The one thing that kind of threw me off though, was the wide assortment of pickled vegetables…It was still early, and I had a hard time imagining anyone enjoying the briny concoctions for breakfast. But I had seen stranger things being served for breakfast, so I figured I would give it a try. I quickly gave up on the idea after my first bite which paired nastily with the more ‘typical’ breakfast snacks I was already munching on. Germans can be funny, so maybe these pickles were just some sort of joke to play on jet-lag suffering tourists and weary travelers who were too tired to use common-eating-sense.

Overall though, the bountiful buffet was a wonderful surprises and allowed me to stuff myself (and my messenger bag) for the upcoming 8 hour flight home.

Pickled vegetables for breakfast? Well the buffet can’t be perfect, so I will let this one go.