I drove to my own airfield the other day, walked up to the café I've eaten at for years, and couldn't get a table. Turns out the national press had found the place first. Here's why that's the best problem an airfield can have. And why I still ended up at a drive-thru.
The Aerodrome Café at Elstree has been quietly brilliant for a while now, run by a Michelin-trained chef and his wife. Then a few days ago a national paper wrote it up, and half of Hertfordshire turned up on the same morning I fancied lunch. Hence no table for me.
My first reaction was peak grumpy pilot. This is my spot. I land here. I knew exactly what I wanted, too. Omelette and chips, same as last time, and a slab of their cake to follow. Michelin-trained chef or not, that's my order and I was ready for it. Surely that earns a man a chair. It does not, as it turns out. The family watching the helicopters had every bit as much right to that table as I did, and they'd got there first.
Then I had a word with myself.
Because a packed café is the best thing that can happen to a small airfield. We keep losing these places. Up and down the country GA fields get sold off, built on, complained out of existence, or quietly priced into the ground. The ones that survive tend to be the ones worth something to more than just the pilots. A café full of families on a weekend is footfall. It's money through the till. It's a few hundred people who now think of the local aerodrome as a lovely day out, not a noisy field they'd rather see turned into houses. That matters a great deal more than my lunch.
Caz, for the record, was as gutted as me. So we did what any pair of grown adults with a perfectly good café behind them would do. We got in the car and went to McDonald's on the way home.
Not, and I cannot stress this enough, in the slightest bit good for us. There was a Michelin-trained chef forty yards back up the road, and all I'd wanted was an omelette, some chips and a bit of cake. Instead I got a drive-thru. In our defence, they had Biscoff McFlurries, and there are some decisions a man doesn't have to justify. It wasn't the omelette. It wasn't the cake. But it was something, and the queue was shorter.
If you want the full picture of the place, the circuit that flips at two, the pink approach lights, the footpaths across the runway and the café that started all this, it's all in my Elstree airfield review.
So no, I didn't get my usual table, my omelette, my chippies, or my cake. Good. Long may it be too popular. An airfield people love is an airfield that gets to stay an airfield. And here's the thing, Elstree isn't going anywhere. There's something like £15 million going into new hangars on the field right now. So if they've got fifteen million for somewhere to park the aircraft, here's my humble pitch: spare a few quid to make the café a bit bigger. Maybe even stretch to a little brass plaque on a table in the corner. Reserved. Doesn't have to say for whom. I'll know.
