Best Airport Food

Since edible meals (and even snacks!) on flights are a distant, gut-rumbling memory, it’s critical for the health and well-being of your own personal, frequent-traveling self to know where to find decent food in an airport. And in the all-too-common-and-unhappy event that you’re stuck on the tarmac for three hours (the new limit - are you kidding me?), and you’re out of beef jerky, you know the friendly sky folks won’t be pulling out the stored rations to feed you, because there aren’t any. So you need to know where to fill up first. Preferably with food you might actually enjoy.

No national chains allowed here, just local and regional specialties. I’ll think of some more in a couple hours when I get hungry, but for now here are my favorite places to eat, pre-flight or on a layover, in no particular order:

1. Dickey’s Barbeque at DFW, several outlets. Why? Because it’s the closest you can come to Kansas City* barbecue in an airport. It’s not the best barbecue by a long shot, but for an airport it’s reasonably good. And I like their green bean side dish, cooked with bacon and potatoes.

*Here in Kansas City we disagree on which local establishment has the best overall barbeque, because we have so many good ones. My favorite has always been Arthur Bryants — which Calvin Trillin of The New Yorker called “the best restaurant in the world” — but the one at the airport is only so-so. It’s probably as good as Dickey’s but I never eat at my own airport, so I’m not counting it.

2. The French restaurant in Concourse B at Denver*. You can sit down, away from the bustle, and enjoy real French cooking. The onion soup is good, and I had a pretty good coq-au-vin there too. It’s a classic French dish of roasted chicken cooked in red wine with potatoes. When done right, it’s one of my favorite meals ever.

* The Denver airport is practically halfway to Canada from Denver. It’s miles from anywhere, surrounded by nothing but vacant, flat land. Why then did they deem it necessary to put the rental cars miles away in another empty wasteland? They could have just as easily put them next to the terminal and saved everybody a 15 minute bus ride. Somebody got paid off.

3. The Mexican place in Tucson. Can’t remember the name right now. The same family has been in the business for 75 years. The Mexican food is quite good, but even better is the view out the window of the adjacent air base, where you can watch stealth fighters taking off and landing. Those are some cool looking planes.

4. The food court at JFK. All kinds of international dishes you don’t normally see anywhere else. On a recent layover I tanked up at the Indian food counter. As good as a lot of non-airport Indian restaurants I’ve been to.

More coming when I think of them. So, what have I missed?