AKL-SYD last week on A330-200, evening dinner flight:
It seems that out of AKL you now get the new menus while out of Australia they still got the same old menus from September last year. I can't state is often enough that Qantas, this is not good enough!
Also not good enough is treating the cheese platter and, can you believe it, the ridiculous 8-leafed salad a "main choice"
. The menu read as follows (I've tried to rotate it now using three different types of software and for some reason this particular photo just always shows sideways once I upload it here- so my sincere apologies!):
Given that I'm allergic to seafood, I had no other choice but the carrot soup and then selected the steak but without spinach to avoid that the meat and potatoes end up sitting in a pool of poison-green spinach water (yikes). As always flying out of Auckland with their extremely sh%%#y Qantas lounge, I was starving so tried to get a large soup as a starter which usually worked but in this case the young crew member seemed very inexperienced so she "wasn't sure if this is possible". I then told her it's not about the soup but rather about the dollop of lemon yogurt so even just a little bit of that on the small portion of soup would do.
Guess what I got delivered? A small bowl of soup with no yogurt in sight. "Carrot soup" sounded rather boring but it was actually alright. I bet it would have been awesome with some lemon yogurt
After the soup, the service was taken over by the much more senior cabin manager and he was SO much better than his younger underling earlier. The typical really good Qantas service, super attentive, refilling the drinks without even having to ask him and so on. The main, however, to my big surprise got served to me by the First Office who even confirmed that it's "Without the spinach Mr. Berlin, like you ordered". This is only the second time this has happened to me, first time was a few months ago when the captain suddenly came out mid flight to top up everyone's drink. The steak also looked very nice and the meat quality was excellent though too dry as ever so often. The garlic and the very buttery potatoes helped with it a little at least so all in all I was very happy with this meal:
Notice how Qantas even has two stalks of Rosemary on top of it. It's these little details that really make your meals special and I find Qantas to always be excellent in these things.
Unfortunately, the story is not quite over at this point: After a pleasing cheese plate and a scotch or two, I went to the loo once last time before landing. And guess what I saw the crew munching on in the galley: Leftover carrot soup. With lots of bloody lemon yogurt left over even