The 10 Best Airport Restaurants That Are Actually Good

Airport food has been terrible for so long that we accepted it as inevitable. Then chefs realized that captive audiences with expense accounts represent a real market, and everything changed. The best airport restaurants now rival what you would find in the cities they serve, minus the Uber surge to get there.

Check which side of security it sits on, and which terminal. This is the whole exercise. Atlanta is the easy case: the Plane Train runs between every concourse inside security, so One Flew South is reachable from any gate in the airport. JFK is the opposite, since you cannot walk between most terminals airside, and a restaurant in Terminal 4 is no use to you if you depart from Terminal 8. Check before you build a two-hour layover around a sandwich.

One Flew South in Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson is the standard bearer. It has been serving sushi-grade fish and craft cocktails in Concourse E since 2008. The hamachi crudo is genuinely excellent. You are eating it surrounded by gate announcements and rolling luggage, and somehow it still works.

Tortas Frontera by Rick Bayless at Chicago O'Hare brings the James Beard Award winner's Mexican cooking to Terminal 1 and Terminal 3. The tortas are built with the same ingredients and care as his sit-down restaurants. The guacamole is made fresh. In an airport. That should not be possible, but here we are.

Cat Cora's Kitchen at San Francisco International brings Mediterranean flavors to Terminal 2, while The Dutch at JFK's Terminal 4 offers Andrew Carmellini's take on American comfort food. In Portland, Laurelwood Brewing has a full taproom in PDX that pours locally brewed beer that is better than what most cities offer in their bar districts.

Portland is the reason Laurelwood belongs on the list. PDX enforces a street-pricing rule, so a pint inside the terminal costs roughly what it costs in the city, which is rare enough to count as an attraction. Elsewhere, check whether your card's Priority Pass includes restaurant access rather than lounges. At a number of airports it converts into a fixed dining credit per person, which buys a better meal than any lounge buffet.

Internationally, Caviar House and Prunier at London Heathrow serves champagne and caviar at Terminal 2. The Wine Bar by Jose Andres at Washington Dulles brings the famous chef's Spanish sensibility to a space most people just pass through. Even Singapore Changi, which has an entire butterfly garden, features hawker-style stalls that serve legitimate laksa and chicken rice.

Munich has a brewery. Airbrau sits between the terminals at MUC, brews its own beer on site, and has a beer garden with actual trees in it. It is better than most airport bars anywhere and you can reach it landside between flights. Meanwhile, the tablet ordering that OTG rolled out across JFK Terminal 4 and LaGuardia is worse than a counter: you order from a screen bolted to the table and then wait for someone to find you.

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