Travel

Ejo #22 – Our Flight To Madrid, Spain (Or; How Emirates Airline Completely Screwed Us Over, And Yet Managed To Redeem Themselves As Well)

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I’ve been known to have some zany stuff happen to me.  Of course, nothing comes even close to the travails of Dangerous Doug, but still, I’m prone to predicaments.  Our recent flight from Dubai to Spain was quite an adventure.  Our flight was scheduled to leave at 8am, so we left the house at 5am.  We like to get to the airport the full three hours before a flight, to avail ourselves of the free champagne on offer in the Emirates Silver Lounge.  Yes, even at 5am!  Don’t look at me that way!  It’s free Veuve Clicquot; you drink it no matter what time of day it is!

 

Anyway, things went awry from the moment we checked in.  We were advised that it was a very busy flight and we should proceed to a different counter to drop off our bags and collect our boarding passes.  This seemed odd, but we casually sauntered over to the other counter to complete the check in process.  When we got there we were asked for our paper tickets.  I think I guffawed.  Paper tickets??  Was it 1997?  No, we said, we don’t have paper tickets – we’ve already checked in and just need to drop off our (already tagged) bags and pick up boarding passes.

 

The lady behind the counter then looked at us funny and asked, “Chryss and David?”  We looked at each other warily and nodded.  She plastered a smile on her face and told us that the flight had been overbooked and we may get bumped to the next day’s flight (there’s only one a day).  She then proposed a pretty sweet deal – if we voluntarily took the next day’s flight, we would each be given another ticket to Madrid (valid for 12 months) – for free!  We asked for time out to confer and entered into deep, frantic discussion, quickly weighing up the pros and cons (like some weird game show).  We came to the mutual conclusion that even though it was a tempting offer we’d prefer to take our chances and try to get on this flight.  After all, we had already booked (and paid for) a connecting flight to Barcelona, accommodation and a fancy dinner that night.

 

The lady looked at us with a glint of admiration in her eyes and directed us to the standby counter.  As we turned to leave, she whispered conspirationally, “I hope you get upgraded to Business”.  Gee, I thought, that’d be nice but I just hope we get on the frigging flight!

 

So we went and registered, along with dozens of other people (all bound for different destinations around the universe) and  waited.  And waited.  And waited.  A couple of hours of waiting later we had to accept that a pre-departure glass of champagne wasn’t looking good.  In fact, it was looking like we’d have to hail ourselves a taxi and go back home.  Having just finished working a night shift, David was visibly starting to flag.  He’d been awake for about 24 hours.  I’d had only three hours sleep and was beginning to feel rather fatigued myself.

 

All but resigned to spending another night in Dubai, I figured I might as well try to find out what was going on.  Our flight was due to leave in 35 minutes and I didn’t hold up much hope but thought it might be worth asking anyway.  I approached the busy counter, jostling my way through the throngs of people and said to the lady, “Madrid?”  She asked my name, typing it into her computer.  When she looked up at me I immediately knew we were on the flight.  The skies opened and the sun shone onto her face as she smiled and said, “Bring your bags!”  The disgruntled crowd parted as we loaded our luggage onto the weighing station.  She printed off our boarding passes and handed them to us – 10F and 10J.  Business class, baby!  Woohoo!

 

It was now OK that we’d missed out on Lounge time because we could get as much free champagne as we wanted on the flight!!  Seriously, I would have been happy seated in economy (yep, even between some morbidly obese guy with a BO problem and a baby with seven hour screaming capacity).  We were on our way and that’s all that mattered!  Business class was just a bonus.

 

We rushed to the departure gate and were the last ones shooed onto a bus which took us to the aeroplane.  On the 20 minute ride David actually started looking pale with exhaustion.  I wasn’t feeling great either.  But there were no complaints out of us!  We were going to Spain!

 

When we finally got onboard, it was already 15 minutes past our scheduled departure time.  We were then delayed an additional 90 minutes because of an air-conditioning problem.  We happily passed the time sipping champagne and, eventually, we took off for our seven hour journey.  It did cross my mind that the three hour buffer we’d allowed ourselves in Madrid to make our connection to Barcelona might have dwindled a little bit, but I never really considered the possibility of missing it.  I’ve been close a few times but in all my years of air travel I have never actually missed a flight.

 

So, we arrived in Madrid with about an hour and fifteen minutes to catch our domestic flight.  Madrid airport is enormous and, unfortunately, we were departing from a different terminal to the one we’d arrived in.  But first we had to jump on the airport monorail for the ten minute ride to Baggage Claim.  Once there, we grabbed our bags and made a dash to the information desk to find out how to get from Terminal 4 to Terminal 2.  The information guy told us, in tortured Spanglish, to catch the “green shuttle bus”.  With time ticking we ran outside, carting our bags, and couldn’t believe our luck when we saw a green shuttle bus waiting to depart.  We jumped on just as it pulled away from the curb and we both breathed audible sighs of relief – we might just make the flight with 50 minutes left until departure.

 

A few minutes into the bus ride, I looked around at the other passengers and noticed that, oddly, no-one else was carrying any luggage.  A bad feeling ensued.  The bus eventually pulled into a large car park and everyone disembarked.  We just stood there, bewildered, tired and confused.  We must have looked quite pathetic because one guy came back to inform us that we had somehow got on the bus to the staff car park.  My heart sank like an anvil.  When we told him where we wanted to go he very kindly directed us to another (green) bus parked up ahead and told us to catch that back to Terminal 4 whereupon we should catch a different (green) bus with T1/T2/T3/T4 on the front.  As we shuttled back to the airport we started to worry for the first time that we actually wouldn’t make our flight.  I felt really bad for David who had been up for over 30 hours by now.  Still, we had to try to make that flight to Barcelona.  We weren’t giving up.

 

Back at Terminal 4, we jumped on the next green bus to Terminal 2 (yes, we made sure that was, indeed, its destination) and arrived there five minutes later.  There were still forty minutes before departure time.  We’d formulated a plan that David would put all the luggage on a trolley and that I’d race ahead to check in and get them to hold the flight for us (brilliant plan, no?).  I started following the signs to Check-In: around a corner, up some stairs, around another corner, up two escalators, down a travelator, around another corner – wondering the entire time where the hell check-in was.  Eventually I found it and waited in line while David caught up.  When it was finally our turn, we breathlessly asked the check in guy about our flight.  He looked at us with compassion in his eyes and shook his head.  Check in for that flight was closed.

 

I had now officially missed my first ever flight.  It was not a very good feeling at all.  Unfortunately, all remaining flights that day were solidly booked up.  We tried the other domestic carriers in the terminal – same thing.  No flights left today.  We were told that the only other option was Iberian Airlines, which operated out of the International Terminal.  Yep, we had to trudge back to Terminal 4 on that ridiculous lime green bus.  We were certainly becoming experts at negotiating the Madrid Airport transport system.

 

Back in Terminal 4 we approached the Iberian Air ticket counter and were told that it would be better for us to go to “Puente Aero”.  Hmmm, OK, sure.  Why not?  It just added to the comedy factor at this point (I could almost hear the Benny Hill theme song in my ears).  We found the Puente Aero counter and plaintively asked if they had any tickets to Barcelona.  When the answer came back “Yes” we were taken off guard.  Perhaps our luck had changed.  We were so happy that we didn’t mind paying the full fare of €460 (though it does sting a bit in retrospect, especially as the original tickets cost only €70).   The next flight was boarding immediately so we got right on the plane, relieved to be on our way at last.

 

We got to Barcelona airport OK but the fun and games were not over.  When we got to Baggage Claim we couldn’t find our flight number on the display board.  This rang alarm bells, of course, but we were so tired that we just followed everyone else from our flight to Baggage Carousel #15.  We figured it might just be a printing error on our boarding passes.  Haha, how optimistic of us!  Half an hour later, when everyone else had collected their luggage and ours was nowhere to be seen, we figured we’d better ask someone what on earth was happening.  I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised if it transpired at this point that our luggage was on its way to Iceland.

 

We asked around and were told that we’d have to go to the dedicated Puento Aero baggage carousel to collect our luggage.  Naturally.  Where was that?  Why, in the next terminal, of course!  This time it was only walking distance so we dragged ourselves, like a couple of zombies, across the airport wondering when these shenanigans would end.  When we got to the special Puento Aero region of the airport we were shuffled back into the airport (huh?), through the x-ray machines and security.  What the hell?  We went in and then right back out again (our minds boggling, the entire time) and, lo and behold, there were our lonely looking bags waiting for us.

 

Exhausted, but happy, we grabbed a taxi and checked into our accommodation without a hitch.  We also managed to get to the restaurant on time, and had an amazing 7 course degustation dinner.  Unfortunately, we only remember a few of the dishes as we kept dozing off during the meal – and no amount of kicking each other under the table helped.

 

There were bruises the next day, but that night we slept the sleep of the dead.

Ejo #18 – The French Laundry versus In-N-Out (And A Little Bit About Michelin Stars)

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I consider myself a “foodie”.  Someone who appreciates fine food (and yes, eats lots of it, as evidenced by my ongoing battle with weight).  But I am by no means a food snob.  I can get just as much gastronomic pleasure from a well made shwarma as I do from delighting in the whimsical creations of a Michelin starred chef.

Ah, Michelin!  Growing up I always associated this name with a chubby man made of rubber tyres.  As I got older and started my passionate love affair with travelling, I realised that Michelin also made road maps and travel guides.  It made sense – those wheels had to go somewhere.  But I only became aware of Michelin as a rating system for fine dining restaurants after I graduated into a full blown foodie sometime in my mid-thirties (around the time I actually started being able to afford the type of food that can blow your mind).

My first Michelin star experience was with David in Paris, 2008.  It was a restaurant called Dominique Bouchet and it offered a “degustation” menu.  The word degustation derives from Latin and means “to taste or savour appreciatively”.  As such, restaurants use it to describe a set menu of several small dishes, each one created to tantalise and delight.  At Dominique Bouchet’s restaurant the degustation menu included “veal head” as one of the courses.  The sound of this neither tantalised, nor delighted us.  I imagined a baby cow’s head presented to us on a silver platter.   But, as the maitre’d explained, it was a roasted cut of veal cheek.  So we went ahead and ate it.  It was sublime.  It was our first demonstration of the kind of experimentation and envelope pushing that can occur in a Michelin starred kitchen.  We were hooked.

Since then we’ve been to a couple of other places deemed good enough to earn the coveted star or two, but we’d never had the chance to eat in a (highest rated) 3 star restaurant before.  That is, until our recent trip to the USA.  Six months in the planning gave us ample time to organise, and save for, a dinner at the famous “The French Laundry” in Napa Valley, California.  Following is a review of this restaurant – and to demonstrate that I am not at all a food snob, I have reviewed it alongside “In-N-Out”, a fast food burger outlet.

HISTORY

The French Laundry started life as a saloon bar in 1906 but when prohibition came along in the twenties, the building was sold and used to run a French steam laundry, hence the name.  The current owner and head chef, Thomas Keller, bought the restaurant in 1994 transforming it into one of the finest dining restaurants in the world.  In fact, Anthony Bourdain has called it “The best restaurant in the world, period!”

In-N-Out started life in Los Angeles in 1948 and was the first ever drive through burger stand.  It was (and still is) a relatively small, family run chain with the simple goal of providing their customers with the highest quality food possible – a credo they still operate to.  To this end, the chain has never frozen any of their produce or meat patties.  No In-N-Out is located more than a one day drive from their regional distribution centres.  Furthermore, to maintain the high quality, none of 258 stores located throughout the western states of the USA are franchised.

RESERVATIONS

To get a reservation at The French Laundry you must call them 60 days before the date you’d like to book.  And the tables go fast.  I was intent on bagging a reservation – no matter what – so two months before our holiday, with three minutes left until their Reservations Desk opened, I started dialling.  No answer.  At the exact moment their desk opened I dialled again – it was busy.  And it stayed busy for the next 45 minutes.  When I finally got through I was told that there were no tables left for that night.  There was nothing for it but to repeat this ridiculous rigmarole of sitting hunched over the phone, hitting the redial button over and over again for the next three evenings – and, eventually, I was rewarded with a reservation for 8.30pm on the 4th May 2011.  Yay!

In-N-Out, on the other hand, doesn’t take reservations.  That would be silly.  It is, however, not as easy to find an In-N-Out as, say, a McDonald’s or a Burger King.  That’s because there aren’t as many of them.  Quality over quantity.  So we found ourselves driving out of our way to dine there.  While it is slightly scarcer than other fast food outlets, getting a table at In-N-Out was a far simpler affair than The French Laundry.  Winner: In-N-Out

IMPRESSIONS

The building which houses The French Laundry looks like a French farmhouse set in a pretty, informal garden.  It’s rustic and provincial.  On entering, we were struck by the country chic interior and by the hushed, formal tone.  The restaurant was, of course, full – though this didn’t detract from, or negatively impact on, the level of service provided.  The servers themselves performed like a well-oiled machine, choreographed to unobtrusive, yet fully effective, perfection.  The service itself was friendly and playful, and not at all stuffy or snobby – which was nice.  The only negative was that when David asked if they would hang up his suit jacket, he was told that they would “prefer” it if he kept it on.  A quick glance around the dining room revealed that yep, all the men still had on their jackets.  Now, I’m completely on board with a formal dress code in a fancy restaurant but I think that not being able to take your jacket off is just stupid.  All it achieved was making all the men in the restaurant more uncomfortable than they needed to be.
Points deducted.

In-N-Out, naturally, doesn’t enforce a dress code.  Like The French Laundry, however, every time we visited (three) they were absolutely jam packed.  There were always at least ten cars in the drive through and at least six people in the queue at the registers.  This was, in no way, an indictment on the service.  Just like the fine dining restaurant, the service at In-N-Out ran like Swiss clockwork.  I recall one occasion when there were 50 orders ahead of ours; we both rolled our eyes, thinking we’d have to wait at least half an hour before we could eat.  Less than ten minutes later though, we had our meal.  Now, most fast food joints pre-prepare a lot of their food items – this isn’t the case at In-N-Out.  The kitchen is completely open and it was easy to see why the food was coming out so fast.  There was a lot of staff and they all worked well together.  Sure, the ambience of In-N-Out doesn’t come anywhere close to matching that of The French Laundry but both restaurants provided magnificent service – efficiently and with a smile.  Winner: Draw.

FOOD

The French Laundry serves two nine-course tasting menus that change daily (one is entirely vegetarian).  They pride themselves on no two dishes having the same ingredient.  Every dish here is an exercise in the mastery of food elevated to art.  This type of thing doesn’t appeal to everyone (it does, if you hadn’t already guessed, appeal to me).  For some, food is fuel.  At The French Laundry, food is theatre.  It is performance.  Each tiny dish, presented with a flourish, is designed to be consumed in three or four bites.  These dishes take hours to compose.  Some take days.  This is NOT food for fuel.  This is food for the senses, first to be devoured by the eyes and then by the mouth, each texture and taste precisely calculated to elicit a rapturous response in the diner.  On this occasion, whilst the food was absolutely lovely, it elicited no rapture.  The sum of the parts equalled, disappointingly, only the sum of the parts.  Perhaps the six months anticipation of dining at this revered culinary institution had inflated my expectations to a level where they could never be met.  Or, maybe it’s just an over-rated (and ridiculously over-priced) restaurant.  I’m glad we went, but I don’t think we’ll be in a hurry to return.

In-N-Out, whilst in a completely different league, also had high expectations to meet.  My favourite blogger, Michael K (www.dlisted.com), first brought the chain to my attention years ago by way of his ardent and avid loyalty to it (as well as the depth of his despair that it is not available in his adopted east coast home of New York City).  During our travels in the USA some very good friends (who, incidentally, are health freaks) insisted that if we were to indulge in fast food it had to be In-N-Out.  So, we did.  The menu is very simple and small – they offer Hamburgers, Cheeseburgers and Double-Doubles (double meat, double cheese).  They also have fries, three flavours of milkshakes and soft drinks.  That’s it!  So let’s talk about the quality of the food.  Every element was super fresh and extremely tasty.  The meat was juicy (but not greasy) and cooked to perfection.  The lettuce was green and crispy.  The tomato was red and actually tasted like tomato, and not cardboard.  Wow, imagine that!  The grilled cheese was melted just right – not like in McDonald’s where they often don’t cook (MICROWAVE!!) it enough.  When ordering, you are given the option of fresh or grilled onion with your burger.  The grilled version was absolutely delicious, caramelised to perfection and full of flavour.  And each burger has a special sauce called “Spread”.  I don’t know what it is (and it looks gross) but it’s yummy.  And just about the best thing of all for me was that if you don’t eat bread (which I don’t), you can simply ask for your burger “Protein Style” and they’ll serve it wrapped in lettuce.  Amazing.  Simply put, this was the best burger I’d ever eaten in my life!  And at just over three bucks, it was excellent value.  I have no doubt  whatsoever that we’ll eat there again – next time we’re in California.  Winner: In-N-Out

I know it seems childish and perhaps a little disrespectful to compare The French Laundry (winner of The Best Restaurant In The World Award in 2003 and 2004) to a family run burger joint – but the fact of the matter is that I walked away from In-N-Out extremely impressed and more than satisfied.  I walked out of The French Laundry feeling kind of… meh!  And ripped off.

Of course this hasn’t completely dampened my enthusiasm for Mr. Michelin and his stars.  But for now I feel like that box has been ticked and I doubt I’ll go out of my way again to eat at a restaurant simply because it has three stars.

If you’d like to compare the menus of the two restaurants (with blurry pictures), here’s the link:

https://ejochryss.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/ejo-18-the-french-laundry-versus-in-n-out-the-menus/