Airport food is expensive, mediocre, and eaten in conditions specifically designed to be stressful. On both ends of a city break, there are better options and they require almost no effort to execute.

The Departure End

Eat before you go to the airport. This is the whole strategy for departure, and it takes about thirty seconds of forethought. Have a proper breakfast or lunch at home, at a café on the way, or near the station before you take the train or bus to the airport. Arrive not hungry and the entire food offer inside the terminal becomes irrelevant.

If you're arriving at the airport hungry, accept that the post-security food options in most UK airports are functional at best. Pret a Manger operates in most major UK airports and is the least-bad option available: predictable quality, reasonable prices for an airport, and sandwiches that are approximately what they say they are. This is genuinely the appropriate framing for airport food. It's not good. It's the least bad.

The sit-down restaurant before your flight is almost never worth it. The food is expensive and ordinary, the service is rushed because staff know you have a hard deadline, and the experience of eating a mediocre pasta in a noisy terminal while watching the departures board is not a good start to anything.

What to Bring

Bringing food from home is more effective than it sounds. A sandwich made at home, a piece of fruit, and a bottle of water you've bought landside before the security queue: this is a perfectly good airport meal that costs two or three pounds. The restriction is liquids over 100ml through security, which means no soup, no smoothies, and no large drinks. The solid food restriction is more lenient: you can bring a sandwich, snacks, and most solid food items through UK airport security without issue.

The Arrival End

Don't eat at the airport on arrival. This one is even easier than the departure rule. You've just landed in an interesting city. The airport restaurant is the worst version of that city's food, in the worst setting, at the highest price. Leave the airport, take the train or metro to a central point, and eat two streets away from your hotel.

The café a five-minute walk from your accommodation is almost always better than anything in the airport arrivals hall. It is also much cheaper, and eating it constitutes your first experience of actually being in the city rather than being in a transit zone that could be anywhere.

The One Exception

Long-haul flights where you haven't eaten properly during the journey are a legitimate reason to eat at the arrival airport if the alternative is navigating an unfamiliar city on an empty stomach for 45 minutes. In this case, a sandwich or something simple from a decent airport food outlet is acceptable as a bridge between the flight and the real first meal. The rule against airport food is about preference and value. It's not a moral position.