A380 In-flight Kitchen, a restaurant named after the giant Airbus airliner, in Taipei January 22, 2009. Imagine a flight without security checks, turbulence or even ticketing. More importantly, there's more than just fish or chicken for dinner. An entrepreneur in Taipei has run exactly this service since November, packing in the passengers, as a restaurant that looks and almost functions like an airliner but sells a full menu's worth of high-end Western food, sometimes in plastic trays.

Airplane food doesn't really have the best reputation but regardless, the A380 In-Flight Kitchen restaurant in Taipei has no problem filling its seats. After 3 Fridays in a row of trying to get reservations, we were finally able to book a table at this amazing restaurant and I'm happy to report that it was a turbulence-free ride.

The inside of the restaurant is modeled after the Airbus A380 airplane and looks just like the Airplane classroom that we taught in at the Suwon English Village in Korea. Melodie taught "airplane" class so many times she could probably still get up and show a room full of people how to use an oxygen mask. Oh, the things we do for money. But teachers aren't the only people capable of working in costume: the waiters and waitresses at the restaurant were all dressed like flight attendants. Unfortunately, none of them got up and started stripping like the staff at the hospital theme restaurant.

After a little while, the lights went down and the staff made an announcement in both Mandarin and English that the cabin crew wanted to welcome us aboard and that free drinks would be served shortly. With that, a stewardess pushed a cart through the restaurant and served us free plastic cups of beer, coffee or pop. We always order ginger ale when we fly, but sadly it was not available... so we went with the free beer.

The menu attempted to be fancy, with pumpkins full of crab and spaghetti topped with a raw egg on offer, but I went with your traditional steak and potatoes. I like my steak well-done and it was served very rare so I had to send it back... twice. Mel's steak had the same problem and Christine's medium steak was so rare it was almost purple. But, it was really, really good (when it was finally cooked the way I liked it)... it'd been a while since I'd had a good steak. Nom nom nom.

All meals were served with a shot of pomegranate liquor, a soup, salad, drink and the world's cheeriest dessert. And for some reason, we also got free plates as well. Score!

All in all, I would say that we had a fun flight this evening. I'm getting a lot of enjoyment out of these foolish theme restaurants, and I believe I've spotted one more that we have to try: there's a puppet theme restaurant somewhere in Taipei and I'm going to do some of my best googling to get us there soon!