For our Party of 5 trip this past June, our whole team traveled together for 2 weeks, starting with a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo on a Japan Airlines Business Class flight which Tim reviewed here. Check out his post for a full review, but in this post I’ll give a super quick “how to” for requesting a special menu in advance, and what I would do for my Vegetarian meal next time.
How to select a Vegetarian meal on a JAL flight
Selecting your special meal online for a JAL flight is pretty simple. If you’re making this selection after your initial purchase like I did, you’ll want to pull up your flight on JAL’s website by entering your flight details (flight number, boarding date, first and last name, and reservation number) and clicking “Booking Details”.
You’ll see your flight on this page, and from there you’ll want to click the “Services (seats, in-flight meals, optional extras)” button.
From the next screen, you’ll have to scroll down to the ‘Show Details’ button. Then, you’ll be able to pick from a large variety of special meals. (So many in fact that you may want to visit this page to understand which kind of special menu you want.)
I went with “Vegetarian Lacto-Ovo Meal”, which represents my version of Vegetarianism (allowing for eggs and milk.)
What did I get for my Vegetarian Lacto-Ovo Meal?
As I was getting settled in, the flight attendant introduced herself and confirmed my special-meal status. She also confirmed that eggs and milk were ok with me.
Hors d’oeuvre: Everything started great with hummus that tasted homemade, and sliced veggies.
Salad: Next up was a very simple salad which was essentially steamed veggies and cucumbers on lettuce and an olive-oil and balsamic vinegar dressing. This came with a roll and a butter-substitute.
It’s not uncommon for restaurants to lump Vegan and Vegetarian dishes into one to kill two birds with one stone so to speak, and that’s the vibe I was getting from my meal, despite the flight attendant clarifying with me that eggs and dairy were ok.
This made me curious what the main meal would be.
Main Meal: The main meal was, again, really more vegan than vegetarian, even though the website and the flight attendant indicated dairy and eggs could be included. I have no issue with Vegan food. My main disappointment was that there wasn’t any kind of seasoning, or flavoring. Thankfully I had some balsamic vinegar left from my salad.
(To contrast this, a week later on our ANA first class flight in “The Suites”, despite the rest of the gang being overall disappointed with the catering on that flight, I was thrilled their Vegetarian dishes were thoughtful and flavorful.)
Here’s what I’d do next time…
For the next meal I simply requested a Vegetarian risotto from the “Anytime You Wish” menu.
I know some folks have to be strict with their Vegetarian diets, either for reasons of health, religion, or just principal. So the following strategy wouldn’t work for everyone. But for me, I can gamble a bit. I’m not a very big eater anyway, so I would have preferred starting with the standard menu and just leaving out whatever I couldn’t eat.
For instance as you can see on the “Western Menu” below, the Vegetarian Tomato Kale & Orzo Risotto is actually offered as a main dish selection option. And I could have simply requested to skip the hors d’oeuvre, which was not Vegetarian.
The Tomato & Kale Orzo Risotto (which I ordered from the “Anytime menu” was significantly better than the plain rice and steamed veggies.
What’s your preference?
I don’t know how many Vegetarians we have out there in our readership, but for the folks who also have these kinds of special-menu decisions to make, what’s your preference? Do you gamble with the standard meals, or do you special-request in advance?
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I ordered the halal meal on my first Air France business class flight, and came away somewhat disappointed. It was essentially a vegan/vegetarian meal, and had no meat/dairy/seafood, and a very unappetizing rice cake. Halal is less restrictive than kosher or hindu, which is why I don’t pick the latter. The only things which are prohibited are pork, religiously unslaughtered beef/chicken/turkey, alcohol, and a few other questionable additives. It’s the default option on Qatar, Emirates, Etihad, Turkish, Saudia, EgyptAir, RAM, etc. and the food is stellar, even if most of the travel community doesn’t realize that. It is done for hundreds of thousands of flights worldwide, and isn’t difficult to pull off.
I threw a hail mary and risked the standard menu when I flew AF in J again, and the seafood option was good. Nothing will beat QSuites in terms of avoiding all of this hand-wringing; I had a full run of the galley. Jews probably feel the same confidence flying El Al. I’m flying both ANA and JAL in J on an upcoming trip, and both have halal options, but I’ll chronicle the quality on the Gram. We’ll see if they actually step up and offer something appetizing.
In general, it depends on the airline, and country of origin. Middle Eastern and African airlines I can just roll with it, jury’s out on Asian airlines, and North American and European airlines reliably miss the mark, and I usually order a special meal.
Vegetarian on an Japanese airline. I fly JAL all the time (domestic, mind you), so there are no meals. But from the photos, the meal looks to be of typical Japanese standard. Remember, with rice, you eat the main with the rice, together.
My only advice, select from the Western menu to fit your pallet and try to avoid overnights in Japanese hospitals haha
I chuckled at “plane” rice, which sounds even less delectable than plain rice. Well done if intentional, a happy little accident if not.
20 years ago, I was on a flight – I believe it was JAL but not sure – from Japan, and was bumped up to biz class. My seatmate was lovely and we enjoyed fabulous conversations. But I had requested a vegetarian meal with my economy ticket, and imagine my dismay to find that his bento boxes contained many things I could have eaten – but they refused to give me anything to eat but my requested veggie meal, which was, like yours, bland and unseasoned. Luckily my kind seatmate shared his desserts with me!
I’m not surprised JAL has bad vegetarian meal, I’m more surprised ANA has decent ones……
We fly SFO to HND with a fam of 4 on JAL business in a couple weeks. We are vegetarian (eggs/dairy are cool) so thanks for this article! After reading through comments maybe I’ll do the Asian vegetarian for 2 or 3
Of us and then chance it with the regular meal and pick the anytime options for the other
My wife and I are both vegetarian and have run into this same issue so far. We are new to the game with limited business class experience, but so far: Lot Polish did a good job with vegetarian food, but Air Canada was bad. Air Canada had just a salad, and we were flying them on a connecting flight too, so we got the same salad multiple times. The flight attendant was super helpful the last time it came and found an extra cheese plate for us so at least we had something else.
I think our strategy going forward is for one of us to do the vegetarian meal and one of us to do the normal menu.
It has taken some carriers more than 30 years to figure how to make vegetarian meals reasonably appetizing, while some like this example are still ignorant. One would think that with such a large flying Indian population, airlines would be more aware of the Indian style of vegetarianism.
For vegetarian, I do not request any special meals on US-Europe/Middle East or any flight to/from India. They always have a default veg option which is typically a pasta or Indian veg option. Infact many carriers like UA/BA serve Indian veg even across the Transatlantic as it reheats better than pasta dishes.
US Carriers tend to be good about including a default veg dish on all their longhaul flights including Europe, South America, and Asia.
As mentioned by other posters, North Asian carriers (JL/NH/KE etc) struggle the most to cater vegetarian as its not a significant part of their cuisine nor do they have experience with a significant volume of connecting South Asian passengers compared to BA/SQ/EK.
That’s been my experience also, any kind of veg special meal ends up being boiled/steamed veggies only. Default veg option that all airlines carry is the best.
What was the vegetarian meal in ANA Suites? Flying it in a couple of weeks and wondering if we should pre-request the vegetarian meal, or just select a ‘regular’ vegetarian option off the menu?
It’s not going to sound as good as it was in real life but it was “Tofu Lasagna Style with Burdock Root & Sesame”. It was not tomato-based so the lasagna title is a little mis-leading, but it was layered like lasagna.
It was fairly accurate to what they have listed online here: https://www.ana.co.jp/en/us/travel-information/meals/vegetarian-meals/
Sorry, I missed this reply, but thanks!
Would you suggest pre-ordering the vegetarian meal, or just choosing the one ‘off the regular menu’?
Unfortunately (surprisingly?) British Airways is the only airline I’ve encountered that doesn’t just use lump all non-meat eaters into “vegan” as the lowest common denominator, to save on costs. In business, they’ll often have something vegetarian with actual lactos and ovos! JAL, Eva, Iberia, AA, LOT, United, and plenty of others will have all those options listed, but they won’t in practice be different from each other.
I always try to order Asian vegetarian meal or Indian Jain to avoid the disaster which is presented in the article and comes with vegetarian lacto Ovo. Eva and Qatar are great. With quatar i think you can order Indian vegetarian meal
This is a great idea – I think in the future I’ll consider copying this idea.
Vegetarian meals are often a crapshoot (although I can only speak for economy offerings). I’ve definitely gotten a “this is what we have leftover” vibe several times when I got random selections of packaged foods rather than things that made sense to put together. Especially for meals less likely to have hot food, like breakfast. E.g., an orange served alongside a biscuit with orange marmalade. On the plus side, you generally get your food brought out first before they serve everyone else row by row. Again, this is in economy. I’d be interested to see how business is different.
In J I usually gamble and pick the seafood or pasta option. And I often eat at the airport ahead of the flight, and could skip parts of the meal if needed.
In Y(+) I usually pre-order the Hindu vegetarian, which is generally some sort of vegetarian curry that tends to be flavorful. The second meal usually sucks, but that is true for the standard meals, too.
Aren’t they all “bland meal”?
It’s been a looong time since I ordered airplane food, but I order a fruit platter whenever possible because everything else requires risking to eat mounds of blandness and/or mush. With a fruit platter, at least I know I’ll at least get fruit pieces I recognize – sometimes the platter comes with cheese. I don’t eat a lot on a plane; it’s not as if I use up lots of energy while in an airplane for hours.
That being said, eons ago while flying to India, I did get some vegetarian Indian food which was the default vegetarian option, and it was pretty good since Indian food typically has more seasoning.