It is somewhat of a conundrum – you need food while travelling, but both airport and airline food notoriously has a reputation that is often well deserved for ordinary food - at best.
Unless you happen to be at the pointy end where food and service reaches silver service standards! That does not happen for most people!
Normally poor to ordinary food at both airports and airlines is a well deserved award – lack of choice, not to your personal taste and sometimes quite pricey [ even on some airlines these days] and catering to a market that is a captive one – you can rarely go elsewhere.
Recently had a meal with friends at Changi Airport in Terminal 1. Outside - that is on the Singapore side before entering the immigration and customs hall and transfer areas inside. This is a location you might consider to not be inspiring, catering as it does to departing travellers and friends, soon to move air side to a better range of options.
Quite a few choices now, mostly asian food with the local Singaporean and Chinese cuisines popular, and with a long line to enter the restaurants. We selected the Japanese Saboten chain – almost by default as it had the shortest – ie no wait time to sit down. That sometimes might have you wonder.........is it ok?
Food was really quite good, with the shredded cabbage [superfine shreds] and tonkatsu sauce salad excellent as an entree. All four of us thought the food very well presented, and tasty, with good service – and prompt, a bonus when you are needing to move off for catching the plane. We all chose one of the variations of the salmon fish dishes deep fried in fine bread crumbs, so cannot comment on the meat options, which were mostly based around pork. The salmon was excellent – tasty and flavoursome.
All dishes around S$ 20 -24, and service seemed to be prompt, even based on other tables. A real bonus for an airport meal choice. And it included ice cream for dessert too!
Would definitely recommend the Saboten as a good food option. A quick google search has also turned up some very positive reviews of the same place by local Singaporeans - try a search if you want.......but try the restaurant too.
Seems the renovation of Terminal 1 at Changi Airport, due for completion in 2012 has already delivered some good food eateries.
In reality, it was just as well we ate there – meals on our flight [ both dinner and breakfast] were both terrible, and many people [ including Asians] did not eat them- at all or many just partially. After all not everyone – not even many Asians - tolerates very spicy food and hot chillies in Asian food, and that was what the dinner meal was. And no choice. One of the worst ever airline meals – and that was on a Qantas flight – just awful food. It was just poorly presented and looked awful too. Breakfast was not much better.
