A breakfast review out of United Airlines' Chicago O'Hare hub has turned into a small catering mystery: a first class "steak and eggs" tray that arrived, essentially, without the eggs.
The meal in question was served on a flight from Chicago O'Hare to Houston. The menu promised steak and eggs with home fries and chimichurri sauce, and for the most part it delivered. The reviewer singled out the sliced cubed steak as genuinely excellent by the standards of airplane red meat, with the chimichurri doing real work as a pairing — the clear highlight of the tray. The accompaniments held up too: a warm chocolate croissant described as very good, ripe fruit, a Chobani vanilla Greek yogurt with 10 grams of protein, and strong coffee.
The problem sat where the eggs should have been. Instead of the expected egg soufflé, the tray carried what was, for all intents and purposes, bread pudding — apparently the same bread pudding the airline has served out of Chicago on other routes. Visibly bread-cubed and with no discernible egg texture or flavour, it read as a carb-heavy stand-in rather than a soufflé that had simply set too firm.
Notably, this doesn't seem to be a one-off. The reviewer points to other reports of the same swap on flights catered out of O'Hare, which shifts the story from a kitchen mistake to a catering issue United may want to address at the station. The fix seems straightforward: put an actual egg component on the tray and this becomes a breakfast worth ordering repeatedly.
Why does a single airline breakfast matter to travellers? Because on longer domestic routes, the inflight meal can be one of the few things separating first class from an exit row, and consistency is the whole point of paying for it. If you're booking United domestic first and planning around the breakfast service out of Chicago, it's worth knowing that the steak half of this dish is a safe bet — the chimichurri-topped beef drew rare praise for inflight red meat — but the egg situation out of ORD may disappoint anyone expecting the menu description to match the plate. The broader lesson applies everywhere: menu descriptions are aspirational, catering varies by hub, and the same dish can differ meaningfully depending on where your flight originates.
For low-carb travellers especially, the substitution stings twice — a bread pudding standing in for eggs undermines the point of ordering the dish at all. Still, the reviewer's verdict was fair: they'd order it again, eggs or no eggs. There's a good breakfast here. It just needs the eggs its name promises.
Story via Live and Let's Fly.
