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And yet, on a layover in early November, I hoped. Though lacking in atmosphere, the Miami airport is much like Miami itself, with Cuban restaurants and cafes strewn throughout the complex. Finding an excellent specimen of the Cuban sandwich — roast pork, ham and Swiss cheese with pickles on a roll, panini-pressed into gooey, crispy deliciousness — should, I figured, be easy.

Hardly. At Bongos Cuban Café, a sleek sandwich bar owned by Gloria Estefan, the Cubano was well-pressed but devoid of flavor. At the Casa Bacardi lounge, it was inedibly dry — which was probably the point. The drier your mouth, the more Bacardi rum mojitos you’ll consume.

By the time I reached La Carreta, I was nearly in despair. Sure, this outpost of a Miami mini-chain looked appropriately shacklike, with a stand-up coffee counter and a cheap-looking backlit menu that included a host of tropical-fruit shakes. It certainly felt like Little Havana. But I’d been fooled before.

Not this time. The roast pork was juicy, garlicky and chock-full of real roasted flavor, and the cheese tasted as if it had actually been produced from the milk of a cow. La Carreta’s was a Cubano I would happily eat “off-campus,” as airline employees refer to the world outside the airport, even though the bread was oddly chewy and I wanted more pickles. Then again, I always want more pickles.

No one likes to eat in airports, but eat in airports we must, since we’re spending more time there than ever. Around one in four air passengers experienced trip delays averaging an hour and 54 minutes in 2007, according to a report from the Center for Air Transportation Systems Research at George Mason University. And it only gets worse during the holidays, said Lance Sherry, the center’s executive director, since airlines are running at maximum capacity and therefore can’t easily recover from delays and cancellations.

“Small delays will have a big impact,” he said.

At the same time, he added, the airports “perversely” benefit from the delays. By offering cheap leases to airlines, he said, the airports have to make money somehow, and they do so through concessions. Which is why that ice-cold turkey sandwich costs $9, the bottle of water is $3, and the delays never seem to get any shorter.

“They’re incentivized to keep passengers longer,” Professor Sherry said.

Still, there are bright points. In October, JetBlue opened a striking new food court in Terminal 5 of Kennedy Airport in New York (more on that later), and with another holiday season approaching, it seemed appropriate to see if good restaurants might exist in other American airports, perhaps overshadowed by the Cinnabons and Sbarros but producing honest, edible food nonetheless. And so, over the course of four days, I flew between some of the nation’s biggest hubs — Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Dallas-Forth Worth, Los Angeles and, in New York, La Guardia and Kennedy, which together accounted for about 400 million passengers in 2007, according to Airports Council International, an airport trade group — and tried to discover food worth eating. But what to seek out? And how to find it?

First, I wanted to ignore the big chains and focus instead on local food. Each of these cities has a strong, distinctive food culture, and I hoped this would come through in the airports. Plus, I reasoned, local employees might have a greater connection to the local cuisine and thus a certain pride in seeing it done right.

By this measure, Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport was exemplary, with not one but three Texas-style barbecue joints, all branches of off-campus stalwarts. Cousin’s Bar-B-Q was easily my favorite — the brisket had just the right balance of meat, fat and chewy, charred burnt bits — while Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, whose brisket was watery and ribs dry, made an intriguingly spiced hot link. Only Railhead BBQ disappointed, perhaps because I was already stuffed and had to save my chopped-beef sandwich for a cold midnight snack.” ( via travel.nytimes.com  ) by MATT GROSS

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