The Big Country

One Sentence Review: Free Foods NYC

Free Foods NYC: Somehow, it's extra galling to pay $12 for a lunch salad at a place with the word "free" in the name.

One Sentence Review: Barbone

Barbone: No Frank, No Max and, thank God, not so much red sauce.

Ruzyne is Rich

Ahem. Allow me to be a crotchety old man for a brief moment: How big is Prague’s Ruzyne airport now? It broke my I-am-doing-this-in-my-sleep rhythm of taking the subway/bus to the airport last month, that’s how big it is.

Now there are TWO stops at the airport on the bus, ho ho ho! (That doesn’t count the thousand k letiste stops that precede it). The stops are confusingly divided up between Schengen and non-Schengen agreement countries—think fast, Americans--which is ridiculous, as the Czechs join at the end of the year.

Once I got inside I was struck how empty it was at 8am, normally a busy time for an airport--especially one that sends passengers to other parts of Europe as its bread and butter. Perhaps it’s built like buying shoes for an 11-year-old, in that the airport is meant to grow into it.

Here comes the old man part:

I’m easy to entertain. Heck, I was impressed with the capacious foodstuff/duty free shop they built on the far side of passport control a few years back. Now, with a sprawling selection of shops that I still have no intention of visiting spread out over four or five terminals, it just feels like weird version of Detroit without the monorail. It’s too bad.

Not to say that it was better when you had to take the bus to the terminal because there were no sky bridges, or when the only way to fly there on an American carrier was via Stuttgart, but the expansions are a microcosm of what’s happened to Prague itself: rapid, efficient development at the expense of personality. I bet they’ll even break a thousand-crown note at the airport without a single sigh or complaint. What a gyp.    

Low Country Low Blow

Peep my defense of Belgium at WorldHum. Frites-tastic!

One Sentence Review

Belcourt: Like Uovo, only with alcohol and good customer service.

Cut-Rate Cutlet

I am a schnitzel enthusiast.

It doesn’t really carry the same cachet as cured meats or runny cheeses in the pantheon of food boosterism, probably because here in the U.S. it’s no different from what you’d get in a chicken parm sandwich. But I love it nonetheless. It was one of the few foods my paternal grandmother knew how to make, and what’s not to love? It’s breaded and fried meat, a proven winner among cuisines from Italy to Japan.

A few weeks ago I was in Vienna, which is the ancestral home of schnitzel. Weiner Schnitzel is traditionally made with veal, though these days they serve it with pork or chicken subbing in for tender baby cow. Since I was there for only a few days, I took it upon myself to eat as much schnitzel as possible during the trip--with the occasional palate-cleansing käsekrainer, a sausage injected with cheese. Yes, the Viennese know how to party.

On my last day—really my last meal in Vienna—I ended up at Figlmüller. Figlmüller is a schnitzel restaurant that’s over 100 years old. It’s where you’ll be sent when you ask the concierge about schnitzel, just because, well, that’s where they’ve always sent the tourists.

Hear that noise? The sound of alarm bells, in case you are wondering.

I should have known better than to hit a tourist trap, but I had time to kill before my train. I ordered one of their famed pork schnitzels, larger than the plate and paired with potato salad. The schnitzel was massive—it’s pounded super-thin--and is best described as a blanket of pork. In my case, it also arrived warmed-over from the kitchen in less than two minutes, making it my least favorite schnitzel of the trip.

C’mon, Figlmüller, at least pretend you’re making me a fresh one next time, OK?

Idle, Wild

JFK is a broken airport.

Flying into JFK on a Sunday night, from anywhere, is up there on the scale of terrible ideas with using Crisco as sunscreen and keeping Jason Giambi on the bench in the 10th, but that’s no excuse. Returning from Europe the other week, I sat for two hours after we landed—on time even after a go-around—just waiting for a gate to open up. Forget traffic on the apron and taxiways, we were at Terminal 1! There were no gates for our Lufthansa 747.

All I could think of was the Air France flight that waited five hours at this same terminal for a gate. After the first hour, I was as close as I ever have been to air rage, which meant that I made German jokes and sighed heavily. Inappropriate, but I was in a middle seat for about ten hours at that point, people. And normally the Germans are so good at planning!

I believe regional jets are the problem the New York Metro airports. Are they a great alternative to the turboprops that airlines used to fly on certain routes? Absolutely. Are those the routes that airlines are using them on? Nope.

You can end up flying two-hour plus jaunts on those babies, on popular routes, like to Chicago or Boston. Without a shuttle bus solution to get passengers to the gate as in Frankfurt, a formula for pushing the use of big planes, or at least giving them priority, should be employed.

In the meantime, I’ll walk to the friggin’ terminal. Just let me off.