Food News
In my quest to agitate for better food selection at airports I thought I might mention a few new developments in this vital area.
USA Today has a article out on changes for Terminal 5 at JFK. Terminal 5 is going to be dedicated to JetBlue, an airline I really, really promise that I'll check out someday. Hopefully. In any case, they've really attempted to ramp up efforts to deliver food service that is not exclusively based on breaded, deep fried, and/or coated with wing sauce type foodstuffs. Not that I have anything against wing sauce but it really just doesn't belong on a salad.
The most interesting development is the introduction of a dining option called re:vive. Seriously, don't you hate how punctuation is now a slave to the dictates of marketing? Then again, if you're not a grammarian (and is that a real job, can you get a piece of paper that says "Certified Grammarian"?) do you really care what they're doing to poor defenseless colons and commas?
Interestingly enough I suspect that the real reason they decided to go with the strangely punctuated title of the concept was that plain ol' revive is a little close to 'Revivals' - the name of the arrival lounge that Virgin Atlantic maintains in Heathrow. In any case and leaving aside questions about copyright infringement, re:vive is potentially quite an interesting concept. Basically there are a number of tables or clusters (I don't know what this really means either) that besides electrical outlets for laptops and such, will also have flat screen displays which will list flight times and menus for food and drink. Select something to nosh on and swipe your credit card and someone will bring you eats and drinks in around 10-15 minutes accordingly to spokesmen. Sounds cool. I like the whole not standing in line aspect.
Besides the high tech offerings there will also be a total of 9 full service restaurants that offer Asian, Mexican, sushi, steakhouse and so on. On top of that there's a food court area that purports to offer a 'modern take on the traditional food court'. Since the offerings include pizza, philly cheesesteaks, and burgers, I'm going to take that particular contention with a grain of salt.
Finally there's also some gourmet markets that will offer prepackaged food stuffs probably suited for eating on the run or in the air. There will be vegan kosher, organic and other healthy alternatives that will probably taste somewhat better than cardboard but not greatly. I mean, really how good could it be if it's not dripping in wing sauce?
I approve highly of plans like this and would like to see more airports institute this type of innovation, especially hubs. It would make the delays less onerous.
