The ‘Sicilian’ Brisket And ‘Angry Pasta’ American Airlines Is Serving Is Everything Wrong With The Carrier

The American Airlines Admirals Club in Austin was serving ‘Sicilian Roasted Beef Brisket Bites’ and ‘Arrabiatta Parmesan Pasta’ this week.

• Someone thought that brisket in Texas made sense. But in Central Texas, serving ‘Sicilian’ brisket isn’t fusion cuisine. It’s confusion cuisine. And trying it was like flying basic economy: bland, disappointing, and leaving you questioning your life choices.

• Meanwhile ‘Arrabiatta Parmesan Pasta’ translates roughly as ‘angry pasta,’ named after passengers who taste it.

I have a simple rule. You should never serve food that cannot plausibly be described by someone as tasty, or at a minimum, ‘tasty for what it is.’

When American Airlines and Citibank announced updates and a higher annual fee for their premium AAdvantage cobrand credit card that comes with lounge membership, they promised better food. And their ‘premium push’ across the airline has highlighted a drive to improve lounge food further. And… this. It’s a choice. Someone actually had to choose to serve this.

While the kitchen facilities in the Austin Admirals Club don’t mirror those of the finest restaurants, the food here isn’t meaningfully worse than at other Admirals Clubs either.

I’ve said that I’ll believe the premium push is real when Devon May starts signing off on real capital expenses. But I think the better tell is actually the food and beverage program. American launched a Bollinger champagne partnership. That’s great – I actually think Bollinger works better in the air than either Laurent-Perrier (United) or Taittinger (Delta). It’s bigge, Pinot-driven and toasty. It has more depth than the others and also works with creamy oversauced dishes, chicken, pork and salty snacks.

However, champagne was where American needed the least work. Over the summer my Dallas – Venice flight served Nicolas Feuillatte. Perfectly fine! Yet the wines they serve are genuinely atrocious. They’re a box-checking exercise, giving a (de minimis) budget to a supplier like Intervine and taking whatever excess dreck they ship.

For too many years no middle manager has advanced at American Airlines by sweating the details of product, working to get the best experience for the money. They’ve advanced by making sure there’s wine, or food in the clubs, and that it meets budget. What that wine or food actually is has become an afterthought. It’s also not a place that has attracted people who think and care deeply about these things.

The ones who do and are still there have had speaking up beaten out of them by the finance department and by a CEO whose first instruction to employees upon taking the role was to ‘never spend a dollar more than they need to’.

And that’s one of the many reasons that a ‘premium push’ is going to take so much work. It’s not a matter of ticking through problem areas like coffee, champagne, and food for sale in economy. It’s also not only a matter of articulating a vision and explaining how small changes are part of a large whole they’re building – and selling employees on it.

It’s about the culture of middle management, and how they’re rewarded – for sweating the small details of product and getting the most out of every dollar they spend – and recruiting the kind of people who care deeply about how all the pieces fit together for something bigger than any individual item on the buffet.

What’s the story they’re crafting? Because getting ‘Sicilian’ brisket in Central Texas, where brisket at most comes with sauce for dipping because you don’t want sauce to hide the flavor of the meat just makes absolutely no sense.

Here, the meat’s flavor could have used hiding – this version, though, didn’t do the trick.