I fly a bajillion miles a year and as such I have access to the first class cabin on almost every flight, which makes me a lucky bastard as much as a privileged one. I thought I’d share, from a plane of course, just one humbling notes on modern first class travel just to assure the purported-rabble that things up front aren’t gilded so much as smeared with mustard. I’m talking about US domestic first class here. International is much better, even on US carriers.

Anyway the first class food is first class insofar as they give you food. It’s the old coach food, basically, but we get it. Chicken covered in something, with instant potatoes. A block of microwave lasagna. They give us cloth napkins and traytable covers and hot hand towels and glassware to dress it up, and they don’t remove the tin foil right in front of us, but that’s about as elegant as things get.

It’s also always the same. Eventually you just leave the brownie or denser-than-star cake. You just wish desperately that the flight attendant would come take the tray away so you could open your book or computer again.

Of course, they still do pour us as much booze as we want.

published May 17, 2012