American Airlines Serves Bagel and Lox With Butter — Plus a Generous Side of Confusion and Fear

For my Austin – Chicago flight this week I was upgraded about 26 hours prior to departure, so I was able to pre-order my breakfast for the flight. (American had consistently wanted over $500 for a buy up on this segment, so I was pleasantly surprised by the upgrade.)

I was even happier when I saw the selections. They had a smoked salmon platter, which is exactly what I think they should be doing. It’s not going to be Russ & Daughters, but I figured it would be a strong improvement over eggs + potato + pork + sugary pastry.

Here’s the thing. You can see from the description it was supposed to have red onion and capers. It did not. I can manage, and one of my more anachronistic preferences is for white onion.

• Red onions have a milder, slightly sweeter bite that most people feel complements the salt and smoke of lox. White onions are sharper and sulfurous, which can overwhelm the fish (especially Nova lox, again not my first choice).

• he reddish-purple onion against the pink lox and white cream cheese provides the classic visual presentation of a lox platter.

I’d also add that the bagel was cold, in a shrink-wrapped package, and not fully sliced. It took real effort to keep it in one piece as I finished separating top from bottom with my knife. The quantity of smoked salmon was not exactly generous… but it was fine, because the bagel itself was small. And the blueberries in the fruit side were exceptionally sour.

I could manage all of that! My actual main objection here was that they did not include any cream cheese! There was butter! In my entire five decades I have never once wanted a ‘bagel, butter, and lox’. Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Let’s accept that American Airlines isn’t focused on the details of its meals, and over the past several years has been more given to simply ‘box checking’ (there’s a meal? check!). And let’s further accept that worrying about consistent delivery of the meals to spec seems low on their list. But can’t we get basic things right, like ‘bagel, cream cheese, and lox’? I do give them credit for improving on their pandemic-era bagel though.

This meal could be a great domestic first class breakfast, American! Let’s take it the rest of the way there and get the details right!