Airline Breakfasts Are Broken — In The Air, On The Ground, Here’s A Better Way To Think About Them

Breakfast on U.S. airlines is just bad. That’s true whether it’s a domestic flight, or long haul business class. There’s no reason that it has to be this way, but it is this way.

While I’ve had fresh scrambled eggs on Cathay Pacific (and fresh rice!), and I’ve had eggs scrambled (even a little wet) with smoked salmon on Etihad, U.S. airlines shouldn’t try to do eggs. Everything is premade. It may be egg mixture with cream cheese folded in to stay ‘fluffy’. And the planes will have dry-air convection ovens, no steam. Eggs need gentle, humid heat or else they’ll go rubbery, weep, or sulfur up. French toast, too, dries out. Pancakes toughen.

But more than anything, breakfast is seen as the “cheapest” meal of the deal. It gets the lowest-cost builds. Better airlines that impress at breakfast either:

• avoid eggs entirely (grilled fish + rice, congee, mezze), or
  
• use higher-labor cook-chill (sous-vide omelets/poached) and steam-capable ovens.

Remember, British Airways tried serving breakfast instead of lunch in long haul business class because it was cheaper.

And U.S. customers accept this! The breakfast spec is “eggs + potato + pork + sugary pastry.” It travels poorly. Items that do travel (soft rice, braises, custards, bircher muesli) are under-used. Better are tomato-sauced bakes (shakshuka/enchilada-style), custard-style frittatas, or oat bakes. Key is to avoid “scramble,” “omelet,” and “French toast” unless the caterer is DO&CO.

A simple, better approach is to replace ‘breakfast’ with ‘brunch’.

• You can drop eggs and have permission for savory braises, grains, salads, and acidity—things that reheat well and taste like something at altitude. Custards, stratas, braises, and sauced items keep moisture; pancakes, toast, and “scrambles” don’t.

• More willingness to season the food, since brunch legitimizes spice, herbs, pickles, citrus, and umami (which compensate for muted taste at altitude).

• You can rotate global cuisines (mezze, congee, soba, rice bowls) that outperform Western diner plates in a dry oven.

Do miso-glazed salmon and rice with sesame spinach (steam-in-bag rice keeps texture). Congee with condiment kit (scallion, ginger, pickles, chili crisp) is great held to serve at altitude. Bircher muesli with apple and toasted seeds doesn’t require reheating at all! Neither does a smoked fish plate (lox, cucumber, capers, tomato, onion, cream cheese, proper bagel). You can do a Middle Eastern mezze plate. Then add good drip coffee and espresso drinks, along with low-alcohol cocktails – sparkling with a bitter aperitif, Bloody Mary mix that’s savory (umami paste, not V8).

American Airlines discovered smoked salmon bagels in 2017. The bagels weren’t very good, but the effort overall was a great improvement. They rediscovered this in 2022. Sadly it keeps drifting away.

Alaska, for its part (which has the best food of any U.S. airline domestically), does a decent job at breakfast even serving bacon and eggs.

I’ve been back to the Viceroy hotel in DC several times since first writing about it in March, and I’ve had generally great stays. I’ve had status upgrades to suites every time, and I enjoy the midcentury modern design elements. I booked this stay through Chase’s The Edit, since those stays earn credit and status recognition with GHA Discovery. And that meant a breakfast credit ($60 per day) and a separate $100 food and beverage credit for the stay. These can be used with room service, which was nice.

But I did not actually use the breakfast credit my last morning, because I was looking forward to having breakfast at the airport. Weird, right? Airport restaurants are bad and airport breakfasts are especially sad. Even the Japanese restaurants – that aren’t open for breakfast offsite – have to have breakfast offerings, because the restaurant space needs to be used to feed passengers. The default is industrial-style eggs and meat. So uninspiring!

I figured I’d try breakfast at the Capital One Landing at National airport instead. I didn’t have high hopes. I like the afternoon meals, and almost never fly out early enough to try their morning fare. It’s breakfast! No one does that well in an airport. Or, as I think on it, the only breakfast I was actually happy with in a U.S. airport ever really was smoked duck eggs benedict and potato latkes in the Newark United Polaris lounge.

Before heading to the Capital One space, though, I went to the E concourse Admirals Club because I needed to time taking a call and that meant arriving at the airport more than 3 hours before my flight – earlier than you can go into the Capital One Landing but (unlike Delta) American doesn’t have a 3 hour rule for access.

Since I hadn’t eaten anything yet I stopped for their avocado toast. I wish they used better bread, actually, and I should have paid more attention to how they were making it because there was simply too much on it to handle easily.

I moved over to Capital One’s space a couple of hours before my flight. Like in the afternoon, they have food you can order and food you have them get you. There was plenty of fruit and salads and mini-bagels, and that was all good. The pastries though are incredible. I went and had a second of the crema catalana.

The highlight though is real eggs paired with quality meat. The difference in bacon here versus on the buffet in the Admirals Club was striking. I wouldn’t touch that, but this was just delicious and indulgent. It was eggs, but well-prepared, and still interesting rather than bland.

Food on the ground should be better than in the air, though on the best worldwide carriers that doesn’t always hold. And food on the ground in an airport is really challenging. Few spots do it well. But now I know that Capital One is doing it quite nicely in the mornings. That alone isn’t enough to make me organize a morning departure. I’m usually able to leave late afternoon. But it’s nice to see this happening.