For all the fuss made about California's huge population, almost two-thirds of its 36.5 million people are squeezed into just 8 percent of the land. That leaves an awful lot of open spaces in between, as anyone who's ever flown -- or driven -- between San Francisco and Los Angeles can attest.
But my friend Jeff, who does demo flights for Cirrus, had a turbo SR22 G3 in Los Angeles he wanted me to try, and I was looking for an excuse to take the Cheetah somewhere. So we started looking for somewhere halfway in between to meet for lunch. "Halfway," mind you, being in terms of time, not distance, since the Cirrus SR22 could run speed circles around my little sky slug.
We wanted someplace with a restaurant on the field. Flying over an hour to eat peanut butter-cracker sandwiches was something I might have done in my student pilot days, but nothing I'd knowingly set myself up for now. But as anyone who's flown around a bit knows, there's a huge range of quality and variety, even among airport restaurants.
In my experience, most airport restaurants fit into the general basic lunch counter/diner category of eateries, but there are a few notable exceptions. There was, for example, the lakefront restaurant across the street from the Iron Mountain, Michigan, airport. I remember its name -- The Blind Duck -- because it was notable not only for its superb planked whitefish, but also for its large ... and I do mean LARGE ... floating mascot, complete with Stevie Wonder shades, bobbing happily just offshore. There was also the airport café at a little airport in southern Georgia where we stopped with my old Cessna 120 one time, which turned out to be a tollbooth-sized barbecue shack on a corner of the airport property.
On the other end of the spectrum, there was the restaurant at Lunken Airport (or "Sunken Lunken," as the locals called it), alongside the Ohio River in Cincinnati, where my old boyfriend Jim took me on our first official date. He rented a Cessna 150, flew down to Louisville, where I was living at the time, picked me up and flew us back to Lunken. The restaurant there was a stunningly beautiful establishment in the old Art Deco terminal building. There were still intricate, WPA-funded mosaics on the walls, and the candlelight ambiance of the restaurant allowed us to enjoy the lights of the airport outside the windows as we dined on halibut and filet mignon. As first dates go, it was pretty impressive.
Of course, I was brand new to aviation at the time, and there was no restaurant at the airport where I'd just learned how to fly. So for a time, I also thought Lunken was representative of what an airport restaurant was. I know. I laugh when I think about it now, too. But in perusing the possible options halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, I found myself thinking about the restaurant at Lunken again. Because despite the miles of uninhabited terrain along the route, I'd stumbled on a Lunkenesque bistro one time a few years ago at the seemingly unlikely way station of Paso Robles, at the south end of the Salinas Valley.
Twelve years ago, Matthew Riley, a chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America, moved to Paso Robles because he believed it might become another Napa Valley-type wine region, where creative, high-quality food would find a welcome home. Turns out he was right. At the time, there were 32 wineries in the Paso Robles area. Now there are more than 200.
Until four years ago, Matthew worked as a chef in other people's restaurants. But when the city built a new terminal at the airport and put a contract for the restaurant and bar out for bid, Matthew proposed a resturant that would be right at home in the heart of Napa.
"At the time, people said most airport cafes are dives," he says, by way of explaining why few people thought he had a chance at the contract. "But I came here for the wine country, so I had a different approach." And, in the end, his bid was the one the city accepted.
Matthew's at the Airport is a small establishment, but his friends were right. Few airport cafes have intricate cabernet-colored tapestry booths, hammered copper placeholder plates, and menu offerings ranging from Lobster Flan and Noisette of Colorado Spring Lamb to a mushroom tart consisting of "sautéed wild mushroom with garlic, shallots and brandy, reduced with a glaze de viande, finished with cream and presented in a puff pastry shell with melted fresh mozzarella."
In a nod to his aviation patrons, Matthew also offers the best version of the "Hundred Dollar Hamburger" I've ever seen. (For anyone not familiar, pilots often joke about the cost of flying to lunch somewhere. The cheap hamburger at the destination ends up costing $100, once the price of fuel and other expenses are factored in.) But at Matthew's, you really can order a $100 hamburger. It comes with two beef patties, a selection of four cheeses, avocado, sautéed mushrooms, grilled onions, bacon ... and a bottle of Moet & Chandon champagne.
