"Dining" at the American Airline's Admiral's Club, Boston

As I mentioned last week, I'm kicking off a series of traveling reviews, departing my from standard SF Bay Area based reviews.

And where does any travel start?  The Admiral's Club of course!

I've reviewed the SF Admiral's Club before, so I'll skip the basics here, and just jump right into the fine "dining" I experienced at this location.

Breakfast

Admiral's Clubs aren't exactly known for their extensive complimentary food options (usually limited to cheese and crackers, snack mixes, veggies and dip, and soup), but the breakfast spread was decent, at least as far as Admiral's Club locations go.  No hot food, no pastries, but, still, better than I expected.

Bagels, Quickbreads.

One station had bagels (plain or cinnamon raisin), with butter, cream cheese, and jam, plus a toaster. 

No regular bread for toast, but there were two types of sweet breads, which I tried.  One was fairly plain, perhaps orange or lemon, and not very interesting. The other was chocolate, and, after taking a quick trip through the toaster to warm up, was actually not bad.  It satisfied my desire for a muffin, and was a bit indulgent.

The sweet breads were taken away promptly at 10am, FYI.

Oatmeal, Yogurt, Fruit.

The other food station had hot oatmeal with mix-ins (brown sugar, raisins, pecans), which was a nice offering, to have something warm and comforting, and I appreciated the mix-ins, but the oatmeal was really watery and boring.

The yogurt was assorted flavors of decent quality Greek yogurt (Chobani), and I liked the grapefruit segments.  Nothing amazing, but, decent.

Cereal.

Next came cereal, an assortment of 3 varieties (granola, raisin bran, rice chex), plus milk.  The granola was basic, no nuts, no dried fruit, but I guess I could have added some from the oatmeal station.  Again, not exciting, but if I was hungry, Greek yogurt, fruit, and granola would have been fairly satisfying, and far better than what I'd expect from an Admiral's Club.

Snacks

I'm always drawn to snack mixes.  There is something about having something to munch on that I just can't resist.  The Admiral's Club snack mix is never that good though.  Yet I find myself eating tons of it every time.  Is it because it is so salty?  Is it because I just WANT to like it more than I do?  I'm not sure.

Mixes change out all the time, but generally rotate between 3 common savory versions, plus sometimes some sweet little yogurt pretzels.

Honey Mustard Mix.

 The wasn't labelled, but, I believe this is known as the Honey Mustard mix.  It has way too many boring pretzels in assorted shapes and sizes (short rods, full size rods, twists), corn nuts (never that great), orange sticks (ok), and sesame sticks (ok), all with some very mild seasoning, which I guess they think is honey mustard.  As always, I want to like it more than I do, but, it at least gives me something to munch on, and I do like the saltyness.

Mardi Gras Mix.

For once, one of the snack mixes was labelled!  This one is apparently "Mardi Gras Mix", with pretzels (meh), corn nuts (never as good as I want them to be), sesame sticks (decent), and the spicy little cheesy sticks (the best part).  As always, I want to like this mix more than I actually do, but the sesame sticks and spicy sticks satisfy any salty cravings I have.

Snack Mix.

The mix in the Boston (and DFW during my connection) was actually different from the one I had over the summer in San Francisco.  While still loaded up with way too many pretzels, that I totally didn't like, this one had wasabi peas instead of the corn kernels.  This was exciting to me since I do like wasabi peas, however, they mostly just tasted like ... peas.  Not much wasabi zing to them.  There were also almost as many rice cracker snacks as pretzels, and they were completely flavorless.  And a few of the token sesame sticks, something I always want to like, but always fail to impress.  Overall, this was a very bland mix.

Instead of the larger plastic cups the San Francisco club offered, the Boston location had tiny little ramekins. I guess they were a reasonable size for people with restraint when it comes to snack mixes, but for me, they were too small.  It took many refills to get enough of the mix (minus the pretzels), to fill me up!  Luckily, during my layover at DFW, the big plastic cups made a re-appearance.

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Yogurt Pretzels.

Over in the other snack station were the mini yogurt pretzels.  Like last time, they weren't great, but I appreciated having something slightly sweet to go along with my coffee.  Speaking of the coffee, it was the standard Nescafe automatic machine.  Not particularly good, but they did have flavored creamers available, which helped jazz it up a little.

Sweets

Otis Spunkmeyer® Chocolate Chip and Oatmeal Raisin Cookies.

When I travelled over the summer, the new snack offerings were just being rolled out.  I had read that they would have new "upgraded" cookies, so I was met with disappointment then when the same old stale, hard, cookies were available.  This time, the new cookies made an appearance.

I always love the warm cookies served onboard American Airlines flights, so I was hoping these would be similar.  I knew they wouldn't be hot, but they did look the same - large size, soft.  So much better than the old ones.

And they were better than the old ones. But, since they weren't warm, they wound up just being fairly unremarkable soft style cookies.