An anonymous customer, unhappy with his in-flight meals on a Virgin Airlines flight, has written a vivid letter of complaint, sending it directly to Virgin CEO and mega-kabillionaire playboy Richard Branson. Via.
Dear Mr Branson:
REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008
I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.
Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at the hands of your corporation.
Look at this Richard. Just look at it:

I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?
You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in:

I know it looks like a baaji, but it’s in custard Richard, custard. It must be the pudding. Well you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn’t custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. It’s only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the meal on the left might be the desert after all.
Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment. I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents and if they knew I had started desert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries. So lets peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer.
I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.
Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this:

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Baaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any man could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.
Once it was regurgitated it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard Richard.
By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit. Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier due to it’s baffling presentation:

It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.
I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax but obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour. I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.
Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard entertainment. I switched it on:

I apologise for the quality of the photo, it’s just it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen. Perhaps it would be better on another channel:

Is that Ray Liotta? A question I found myself asking over and over again throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this. After that I switched off. I’d had enough. I was the hungriest I’d been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.
My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food, or sleep. Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it surpassed my wildest expectations:

Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie. Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.
Richard…. What is that white stuff? It looked like it was going to be yoghurt. It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture between the Baaji custard and the Mustard sauce. It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and refreshers. I lied to my new friends and told them I’d done it loads of times. When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese Richard, a cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your baaji-mustard.
So that was that Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing. My only question is: How can you live like this? I can’t imagine what dinner round your house is like, it must be like something out of a nature documentary.
As I said at the start I love your brand, I really do. It’s just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to it’s knees and begging for sustenance.
Yours Sincererly
XXXX
* Paul Charles, Virgin’s Director of Corporate Communications, confirmed that Sir Richard Branson had telephoned the author of the letter and had thanked him for his “constructive if tongue-in-cheek” email. Mr Charles said that Virgin was sorry the passenger had not liked the in-flight meals which he said was “award-winning food which is very popular on our Indian routes.”
Hello to all the new readers from Emails From Crazy People. Welcome! Here’s a list of the funniest posts on my blog. Like this one time, I found a chicken fetus in an egg, that was pretty grode.
The only problem with this complaint is that someone who went to university cannot spell dessert!
Saw this too – the good ol’ internet – I would love
to have seen Sir Bransons’ expression if this got to
his hands. That food would definitely make my diet
work that much easier, but his descriptions of the
food are what had me actually laughing out loud. I’ve
never looked forward to any flight for the food, but
this was too good not to share;)
[...] to take it anymore and wrote the following to Virgin Airlines. The entire exchange can be found here. Dear Mr [...]
My my my, this chap seems rather ignorant of Indian cuisine, doesn’t he?
The guy was served typical Indian food – it’s a pity he didn’t like it.
Granted, some of the food seems to be bad, like the really tough cookie, but the rest of the rant is pure ignorance.
You are an ass.
Wow, what a compelling argument, I have no choice but to submit to your superior logic.
… no really, you’re an ass
Um…says the guy named ‘Chad’ :-O
No, I’m afraid you really are an ass.
Prove it.
Unfortunately, multiple sources confirm: you are, indeed, an ass.
Haha, I think that’s awesome. Every time I have an airline meal I THINK the same things, but never say them. It’s hysterical. Well put
@Daniel
“The guy was served typical Indian food – it’s a pity he didn’t like it.”
I can assure you that airline food is most certainly not “typical Indian food”.
sorry you had a bad experience; but after so much ‘good’ English – you referred ‘their’ when ‘there’ would h ave been correct. If you must you use our beloved language so colloquially; please be ssure to get it all correct.
We all make typos.
I find people who criticize other people’s typing when theirs is as bad or worse to be really funny.
Until you’ve slogged through dozens of posts/threads where every word is some sort of internet lingo/abbrev., you have not seen bad typing.
Sentences begin with a capital letter. Semicolons separate independent clauses without a conjunction. You should have used a comma instead, and then completed your thought; you let it trail off to nowhere. There is only one ‘s’ in “sure” and “have” is one word.
Pot.
Kettle.
Black.
Now that was a good one.
This is awesome. I think it’s hillarious.
I see folks getting all worked up over the author’s English. I’d suggest looking at your own self before pointing fingers at someone else.
As for the mail, it’s hilarious!
What awards did they win? A Nobel prize for developing a non-nuclear weapon?
Anybody that goes around checking the spelling and grammar on a public message board is a fucking lunatic.
Who gives a fuck?
Word.
Everybody makes spelling/typing mistakes, and in some countries, things are spelled differently than here in the USA (yogurt vs yoghurt?) so I’m not going to focus on that.
I LOVED this guy’s letter to Richard, very funny! I only wish we could have seen Richard’s reply too.
I especially like that the letter was illustrated with pictures! Hilarious stuff, thanks for sharing!
I have to say this. I love Indian food, but I’d not have touched the food in the pictures with a ten foot pole. Kudos to this passenger for at least giving it a try. Gotta love his sense of humor and his guts. Whether his letter will make any difference, we shall see.
The “crime scene” biscuit itself is a good revelation on the value on the food served. The appearance and contents makes no sense to be called Indian food!
I could barely finish reading it because i laughed so much i cried. It’s hilarious!!!
haahaa, to be honest, i think its just the thought of this that counts, and you can shove your grammar mistakes up your arses, its the hilarity of them actually sending this brilliant letter in that matters! :)
and before you take the piss out of my obvious lack of english skills, im a teenager who is enjoying her summer holidays, and therefore i refuse to concentrate my mental energy on anything even remotely related to working :)
i want a crime scene biscuit. i bet my dog would eat it, even if noone else felt like it xD
The best part of it being illustrated was that it means that the passenger was sitting there, taking pictures of the awful food with the intent of writing a pithy email to Richard Branson with them.
Roflstomped.
[...] to take it anymore and wrote the following to Virgin Airlines. The entire exchange can be found here. Dear Mr [...]
if it was meant to be indian cuisine I don’t think it’s actually supposed to look like that.
Funny stuff. Good argument but it actually does look like indian food. There is a point though, I have only ever been on a plane twice (to LA and back) and I really liked the BBQ chicken on the way up but the rest of the food was not nice. I’m quite picky and there wasn’t much choice. I had to choose something I knew I wouldn’t like just because I slightly like one ingredient and I was STARVIN MARVIN!!! For example, had a choice between a pickle roll and a honey and mustard wrap… I don’t like pickle or mustard :( I reckon I might ring up before hand next and time and see what I can do about the meals. It was Virgin Atlantic as well.
Some people don’t.
Ive had typical indian food and it didnt look like that by a long shot…
And my sides were hurting from laughter at his descriptions.
yuk
[...] gemacht – vielleicht bin ich deswegen auch selten wirklich enttäuscht worden. Anders als dieser Herr, der sich über das allzu indische Menu auf seinem Virgin Air Flug beschwert – das allerdings [...]
I only hope the gentlemen concerned enjoyed his trip more than he did his flight.
I believe the airline got these recipes from a book on biological warfare.
I have flown on an Indian airline before and the food was not the best, being that it was on a plane, but it still looked a hell of a lot better than that stuff. And FYI, if you’re not used to Indian food, it is not a good idea to eat it on a long flight. I learned the hard way.
I can only hope he got free upgrades to first class on his next ten flights.
I don’t care what food this is supposed to be, it looks like something left over from a voodoo sacrifice.
It reminds me of the cafeteria food from high school, which was also inedible.
I wonder if they have the same lunch ladies in hairnets making it?
money…
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