Airplane Food, French Air Style - Paris Part 1

If you are a regular reader of our blog, you probably noticed that Emi and I had to travel a lot for work last year. We viewed travel as a positive because not only did we get to visit some cool cities, eat some great local food, but we also racked up the air miles. Miles which we ended up putting towards back of the plane, row 69, sweaty seats on our 14 hours, 3 stop flight to Singapore in March.

This time around we put our miles towards Business Class seats all the way to to Paris then on to Venice and back. We were scheduled for 3 nights in Paris, an 11 day cruise through the Mediterranean, another night on the return through Paris, and a day in Chicago. Basically a food lover's dream trip.

What a difference there was in flying Business Class on Air France compared to coach on Cathay Pacific. Not everything went perfect, we did get delayed for four hours sitting on the tarmac in Chicago, but that just gave us more time to drink French wine and enjoy the food!

We started our multi-course meal with an amuse bousch of smoked duck and pear. We sipped on a glass of champagne while waiting for the plane to take off, however by this point in our delay our patience was running thin so we moved onto enjoying (downing) French red wine.

Our second course came with a premixed olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette. All you had to do was shake up the bottle by hand and pour it over your salad. It also went well with the bread they served with our meal.

Served with the salad was the best airplane food I've ever enjoyed; lobster meat with with a wasabi mayo sauce (not too spicy, but sweet with a little kick to it). The sauce paired perfectly with the rich lobster meat and a sweet mango chutney. I think I literally licked the plate clean.

Dinner wasn't as amazing as the earlier courses, so I decided to not post any photos. Cold airplane food dishes can be a knockout because even though everything has to be prepped in advance they are still just as good as when they were prepared. Hot food however is a different story. Without proper heating elements on a plane to cook your food everything has to be pre-cooked and reheated so it usually comes out overdone. If you get the choice of a cold or hot entree, take the cold one.

For dessert, our nice Air France host brought us fresh fruit to pair with our trio of desserts and sorbet. I went with the mango sorbet and Emi enjoyed fresh raspberries with her raspberry or framboise sorbet.

The trio was great as well, decadent and rich orange chocolate cake, our first melt in your mouth macaroon and another chocolate cream type of cake. Since we were scheduled to fly through the night and get into Paris around 11am it was important for us to get some sleep, but we made sure to stay awake for all of the amazing food!

In the morning they awoke us with a hot towel some fresh fruit, coffee, and pastries. I enjoyed the first of many pain au chocolats as well, mmm mmm good.

With how the airplane food tasted it made me realize the rest of our culinary trip was going to be amazing.

- Kyle