The best part about airport travel? Pizza for breakfast. One cheese slice plus a cup of coffee equals perfection.
My favorite airport pizza is at Tagliare on Concourse D at LaGuardia Airport in New York, always served by the same super-efficient but never smiling woman. One time I decided to make her day and stopped to tell her that I come through every few months and always look forward to ordering a slice of cheese pizza from her.
A true New Yorker, she looked me up and down with a look of disbelief and shouted, “Next!”
Not only did pizza lady refuse my profession of love, but then a minute later I was told politely but in no uncertain terms that I could not bring my slice into the Delta Sky Club. They serve their own breakfast.
Right. I just didn’t want those weird, bagel-like carbohydrate rounds or the oatmeal. I wanted my slice. Or I wanted Sky Club food to be just a little bit better.
Looks like I got my wish. Half of Atlanta probably received the email two weeks ago from Delta telling us that, at long last, the food inside its Sky Clubs is getting a major makeover. Now, there’s a full breakfast, including hard-boiled eggs. Later in the day, you’ll find two kinds of soup. Free Bailey’s Irish Cream. Mini assorted cheesecakes. Otis Spunkmeyer mini muffins. O happy day!
I’ve been traveling a lot, a lot, a lot over the past couple of years, so I ended up getting a credit card that offered Sky Club admission. I’ve used it often for the relative quiet from the storm, the free Wi-Fi, the bad coffee from the fancy machine, the occasional Bloody Mary and, well, hmm …
Meals? More like stopgap nonmeals.
At breakfast, there has always been perfectly decent oatmeal, which I never love but always eat as penance for the overindulgence that comes with travel. It is usually better than those Litchfield Penitentiary bagels.
Later in the day I usually make do with a couple of slickly wrapped yellow cheese tiles, crackers, paper tubes of hummus and those too-small-to-be-mealy red delicious apples, which are now the only red delicious apples I ever eat. The carrots and celery sticks depend on the specific Sky Club, but props to the good folks on the T Concourse who always seem to keep them fresh and crunchy.
But, really, much of the Sky Club fare has been of the cheap bar snack variety — crackers and nuts that leave a residue of dehydrated spices and oil on your fingers.
Powdery citrus cooler cookies, stale Gorp and yogurt-covered pretzels make me feel sad when I succumb to them. These are old-school packaged sweets that claim to be a bit healthier than the alternatives but do so in weak voices that convince no one. Yes, there have been little single-serving packages of Nutella, but they don’t come out until the morning bread goes away. Nutella needs toast, not Biscoff cookies.
Do you want salt or do you want sugar? That has been the basic message.
But now there will be so much to choose from, including green salad, chicken salad, two kinds of soup, marinated mushrooms, bananas and dark chocolate chunk cookies. Even the crudites are getting a makeover. Carrots and celery will be joined by red pepper strips and broccoli. (The pepper strips worry me: Those things do not take well to inattention.)
The breakfast spread may just break me of my pizza habit. It includes, in addition to eggs, Greek yogurt, Thomas English Muffins (nooks! crannies!) and “locally sourced bagels” on the breakfast table, along with four kinds of cereal. It’s like the Delta bed and breakfast!
I have yet to try the new Sky Club fare, but by the time this column publishes, I will have taken a quick flight to visit my mother in law in Florida. I have to admit to the nerdy part of my being that hopes I’ll have enough time in the airport to check out all the new goodies.
Seriously, if the eggs taste not like they were boiled a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away but more like something a mom would put in a lunchbox, that will go a long way toward making travel easier. If those “locally sourced” bagels are Goldberg’s, hallelujah.
If this food is just simply make-do good, then we’ve all got another reason to applaud the hometown airline.
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