Last night en route to a dancing weekend, our AirTran flight got delayed 2.5 hrs, and because of some last-minute chaos as we were leaving, we didn’t know this till we got to the airport and parked. Sigh. So the cost-saving measure of eating some dinner before leaving was blasted to smithereens, and we needed to eat some more… airport food. SIGH.
My usual tactic for this in terminal C of Logan is Currito, which is at least recognizably food, if not especially good food. But tallasiandude was feeling cravey and his disgruntled innards and emotional state took him to the asiany rice offerings of Ryo. We got one rice plate with “orange chicken” which looked like standard-issue crappy-chinese-restaurant General Gao’s chicken in the steam table, and we got another rice plate with beef teriyaki, which seemed like a good idea when the place presents itself as mostly Japanese and the teriyakis are cooked to order.
The orange chicken wasn’t terrible, I’ve definitely had worse. It still had a little crunch, and every 4th or 5th bite was detectably spicy, and there was nothing too gristly about the chicken. But when I opened the styrofoam clamshell to behold the beef teriyaki I just broke up laughing. Not that it was especially amusing to find a gravy-soup containing sauteed cabbage shreds and gray bits of the gnarliest beef (sorry, “beef”) I’ve seen in some time, but it hit me funny that anyone would imagine such a thing to be teriyaki. It was more like the chop suey I used to eat from the Kahula Chinese-Polynesian restaurant as a kid, with cabbage instead of celery and a bit more sugar in the gray gravy. Yipes.
We ate most of it, because we were hungry and it didn’t taste so bad you couldn’t eat it. But it did make me sad, and even sadder to remember that this is what most Americans get when they eat Asian food. We’re making big strides in our cities and some suburbs, and urbanites are getting more exposure to genuine cuisines, but if you don’t have that advantage, you mostly get this kind of stuff, sometimes better quality but under no circumstances the real thing. Sigh.
I totally agree that most airport food is horrendous and that the “Asian” food that most of us get is so far from real that it is laughable to call it by that name. As you said there is some light coming into our lives in this area, just got to ride it out.