Airline food quality: tray tables have turned

"First class is obviously the best, if only because they don't use trays and instead bring you food on china," Vlahides says. "But the details that define a true top-end meal are often missing: meats that should be served rare are often overcooked; wine service sometimes comes after food is presented."

His opinion of many business-class meals is lower. Flying business class with United Airlines recently, for example, Vlahides says he was served lasagne made with Boursin-brand cheese. "Who in god's name would honestly believe that salty, nasty Boursin cheese, mixed with tomato sauce and dumped between two flaccid, soggy sheets of lukewarm pasta, would make an appropriate meal in the front of the plane?" he asks.

Bean-counters are partly to blame for such experiences saving a few cents on each meal means significant savings on thousands of flights and millions of customers. However, there are many other challenges beyond cost in getting food to your tray table.

Perhaps the greatest is space and not just passengers' lack of table and elbow room. Everything loaded onto planes must conform to precise sizes and weights. There is no room on a stacked trolley for bread rolls a centimetre too high.

Hygiene is critical and standards are high and rigorously maintained in aviation catering facilities. When Traveller visited Q Catering's facilities at Melbourne Airport, every surface was spotless, all employees clad in white coats and hair nets.

Q Catering produces 38 million meals a year at seven Australian bases, supplying 275,000 flights annually for customers including Qantas, Singapore Airlines and Thai Airways.

The Melbourne facility, which produces an average of 170,000 meals a week, has vast preparation areas filled with industrial kitchen equipment and tables covered in scores of identical dishes. Each is a perfect replica of the photograph staff work from, below which are exact weight and volume requirements.

The importance of maintaining the "cold chain" is emphasised repeatedly that is, keeping food within a strict temperature range throughout the supply chain, rather than allowing the temperature to fluctuate repeatedly. Hot meals are chilled rapidly or frozen and remain so until being reheated onboard. The cold chain is part of the remarkable logistical challenge of getting the right number and types of meals on the right plane at the right time, during the short period that aircraft are on the ground. When flights are delayed or late changes are made to bookings, the logistical challenge escalates.

Add these other challenges to delivering an enjoyable meal: the convection ovens still used widely on aircraft produce relatively long, slow, uneven reheating, best suited to curries and casseroles; there can be no open flames onboard; blunt, usually plastic, knives mean meals including steak are unsuitable; and the low moisture levels in cabin air dulls the palate.

In the past decade some airlines have invested heavily in improving in-flight dining at the front of the plane, as that's where profits are made.

A few airlines, including Gulf Air, have reintroduced onboard chefs and several airlines associate themselves with celebrity chefs. Singapore Airlines, for example, has an "international culinary panel" that includes Gordon Ramsay and Matt Moran, of Sydney restaurant Aria.

Another prominent Sydney chef, Rockpool's Neil Perry, was approached by Qantas to consult in 1997. He was reluctant to put his name to recipes handed over to global catering facilities and crews, so he took a hands-on approach, establishing Rockpool Consulting with its own staff.

"We not only wrote menus but we wrote a complete galley management system," says Perry of his involvement with Qantas first and international business class. "We took out the serving dish that was just baked in the oven and created plating in the sky," he says.

When joining Qantas, Perry said he wanted to "get back to basics" and provide fresh, good quality salads, bread, cheese and seasonal fruit and vegetables. "They were the things that I saw were fundamental, that I saw a lot of airlines weren't doing properly."

Today, the best in-flight dining is akin to a restaurant experience, with crew trained to meet top waiters' standards and front-end passengers given significant choice about what and when they eat and drink.

That's no comfort if you're flying economy, though developments at the front of the plane, such as computer-controlled steam ovens, which cook more evenly and retain moisture better than convection ovens, are trickling down. The extra space on A380s has improved flexibility in food preparation but don't expect innovations such as toasters to be available en masse.

Some seasoned economy-class travellers claim that special meals are created with more care and are usually served first, so they recommend pre-ordering a kosher meal, for example. It will not gurantee a varied menu, however a Qantas economy customer, David Musgrave, from Melbourne, who commuted weekly to Adelaide for six months recently, says "I get vegan meals and they taste quite good. But between September and March I got the same Cajun bean dinner 21 times in a row."

Frequent flyer Vlahides has simple advice for economy passengers: "If you really care about what you eat in the air, bring your own food."