A not-insane guide to airport dining

And this site finally gets more reasonably priced

Yo. Some housekeeping to start: I’ve dropped the price of an annual Bangers & Jams subscription from $80 to $60. You can upgrade here on mobile web or desktop. Here’s why, plus some more details and updates:

• I launched this thing as a bit. My plan was to make everything paywalled, keep things inaccessibly priced and just mess around to learn the Substack product as a new employee. Turns out, I dogfooded too hard and this is now one of my favorite things to do each week.

• I’m proud of this thing, but also recognize it’s kind of absurd to charge the same amount for a weekly food blog as daily, essential reads like The Preamble, Feed Me and Vittles. My job is to help people launch successfully on Substack, and if I were advising myself I’d say $80 was too high. So I’m dropping the annual plan down to $60.

• If you’re already on the $80 annual plan, you’ve been switched over to $60 automatically for the next time your plan renews. I appreciate your additional $20 patronage. As a thank you, just reply to this email and I’ll book you a dinner reservation wherever you want.

• The monthly is staying at the same $8 price, so this thing is $96 a year on a monthly and $60 a year on an annual. If you’re already a paid monthly subscriber (thank you), you can switch to annual here. (Just do the upgrade outside of the Substack App).

  

• I’ll be writing more. At least six times a month, sometimes eight. I’m having fun and I wanna ramp things up a bit. Just this week, I got three texts from friends with restaurant observations and questions I want to weigh in on. So expect the usual Saturday drops plus a bonus item in the middle of some weeks.

Alright, onto the real post for today. I spent the past month on a lot of planes — San Francisco to Seoul, New York to Denver, Los Angeles to Austin — and have crystalized what I think are some indisputable airport takes. Like New York City or a wedding or an NFL game, airports are places that people makes wildly bad dining choices. Let’s stop that.

My airport dining rules

• My No. 1 rule is don’t eat at the airport. Are you insane? No matter how many attempts chefs and enterprising airport executives make, it’s okay to admit that airport food is always bad. Whatever you do, do not have a real meal at an airport. Eat before you leave the hotel. Eat when you get home. But if you’re looking at a menu and a boarding pass, you messed up.

• I respect that the legend José Andrés is trying to change this at DCA. His new Capital One Landing is a good branding and business opportunity. (It’s easy to fill seats and get people to spend in an airport lounge). Customers on Reddit seem to like it. But … no one needed this. If you’re at the airport and you simply must partake in a bowl of gambas al ajillo, you should rethink some life decisions. Let’s all just accept that we can survive without fresh, high quality food while schlepping ourselves from one city to another.

• If you’re delayed on a layover and irrepressibly hangry, it’s Hudson News or bust. Grab some sort of power bar and a sparkling water and keep it moving. Being full on a plane is a nightmare. Whipping out prepared food is travel-ban worthy.

• Order coffee ahead on the Starbucks app. The product is consistent and good enough. Even if Maru set up shop at LAX, I’d pass on it. The lines at these local airport coffee shops are insane, the espresso pulls are finicky, the custom orders are out of control. Get your good coffee elsewhere.

• Growing up in Austin, it was a cute novelty that the airport only featured local businesses. Amy's Ice Creams, Tacodeli, The Salt Lick BBQ. As a kid it was fun to partake. In retrospect, it’s wild that my dad let me throw back sundaes and brisket before boarding a flight. What a time. There is, of course, one exception to my airport dining rules, and that’s JuiceLand. When I fly in and out of my hometown, you can usually find me swinging by Gate 17 for a small Honey Beary smoothie. It’s refreshing, with the same (not organic) ingredients you can get on Lake Austin Boulevard. I finish it before I get on the plane. There’s a bit of an airport surcharge and that’s fine. I deserve the tax for breaking the rules.