For someone who appreciates food as much as I do, airline food is like the Jersey Shore of all TV shows: Trashy.
I went to the airport with Mom to say good-bye to DJ, and we had surprisingly delicious (and extremely filling) late lunch at a restaurant in the airport. Even though there were only three of us, we ordered four dishes because "Since the airline food is disgusting, I need to fill up my stomach so that I can go on without food for 13 hours," DJ said.
The place we found was called Food On Air. Incheon Airport is like a backyard to us since we have been there so many time, but for some reason this was our first encounter with Food On Air. The restaurant featured five different cuisines, featuring dishes from Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and Italian.
It was definitely a challenge to choose what I wanted from the extensive menu! Each cuisine seemed to have been named after the cook: Mr. Kim for Korean, Mr. Takenashi for Japanese, Ms. Huong for Thai, Ms. Pham for Vietnamese, and Mr. Toscani (?) for Italian.
Mom's Korean dish (spicy soft tofu soup and seafood stew with rice) was the first to grace the table. Different banchans (kimchi, seasoned squash, spicy squid, mushroom & quali eggs in soy sauce, and pan-fried fish) accompanied the soft tofu soup. The soup was made with broth from clam, oyster, and other sea creatures.
The seafood flavor was very rich, but the spicy chili oil in the stew balanced out the taste. The soup was a bit too oily and spicy for me because I personally enjoy the soft tofu soup plain white without any chili sauce.
DJ also ordered from the Korean cuisine. His cabbage and short-rib soup had the same banchans as the soft tofu soup.
There were big pieces of short-rib in the soup. Inevitably, they were fatty but the meat was quite tender and juicy. It's so interesting how vegetables that usually don't have any flavor taste...sweet when they are cooked, just like the cabbage in the soup. The cabbage was also very soft.
I had to wait forever for my dish, Thai-styler red crab meat fried rice, probably because I asked for minimum oil. The dish had pickled radish, carrot, and cucumber, sour cream sauce, two pieces of thin pita chips, and miso soup.
Typically, when you cook fried rice, you pour greasy oil. They must have cleaned the wok to get rid of every last bit of the grease...just for me!
I was very happy that the fried rice had abundant red crab meat. That's right, not those gross imitation crab meats, but the real stuff. I would have preferred a bit more seasoning in the fried rice, but at least it wasn't overly greasy or salty. In one word, the fried rice tasted healthy.
I really enjoyed that sour cream sauce! It had tiny carrot bits for the crunchy texture. The pita chip was plain--nothing too interesting about it.
We also ordered a cold soba and roll combo set from the Japanese corner. It had quite a pleasant presentation, with the unexpected squid, squash, and potato tempura, salad, and picked radishes.
The shrimp tempura roll looked a bit messy because of too much flying fish roe and tempura crumbs on the side.
I didn't taste the roll, but DJ, who doesn't like seafood, said he really liked it, so it must have tasted sort of artificial. Haha.
The cold soba was very refreshing. The broth was too sweet though.
We added grounded radish to make the broth taste "cooler." The soba noodle is apparently a lot healthier than other types of noodle. Anyways, it was a satisfying meal and hopefully DJ will be able to endure 13 foodless hours on the airplane!
