At the Airport in the Sky—a one-story, red-tiled adobe terminal that accommodates small planes coming to Catalina Island—people will fly in and land to pay $2.50 for a cookie before turning the Cessna around and flying back to Los Angeles or Las Vegas. The Airport in the Sky has a diner, cleverly called the Airport in the Sky Restaurant, that greets you as you wander in from the airstrip. Owned and operated by the Catalina Island Hospitality Group, it has a counter and a scattering of tables inside and outside. The place sells standard burgers, burritos, sandwiches, and salads, although popular opinion sways toward the cookies.
“They’re really famous for the cookies,” I heard repeatedly as I arrived on Catalina Island on a Tuesday in October. “You might hear about the airport cookies.”
I got there the way most people get to Catalina Island. I caught a ferry in Long Beach at 6 a.m. and wandered into the town of Avalon, not long after dawn. The streets of Avalon were remarkably quiet; I hadn’t visited Catalina Island since my San Marino High School years in the 1980s, so I’d remembered it as a place thronged with drunk summer tourists. In reality, it was hardly crowded at all, since about 42,000 of its nearly 48,000 acres remain wild, preserved by the Wrigley family’s Catalina Island Conservancy. This means that if you want to visit the restaurant at the Airport in the Sky and you don’t have access to a prop plane, you can either plan a mountain hike across the island or you can reserve a prepaid seat on one of the conservancy’s vans. I chose the latter.
The ride, through an epic Mediterranean landscape, took about half an hour. Upon arriving, I ambled up to the airport tower, where a traffic controller was monitoring planes in the vicinity of the island. “Have a pork chop!” he said. He was cooking meat on a hot plate. I declined, saying that I’d heard the restaurant at the airport was excellent. “No,” he said.
I left the control tower and wandered around. The airport feels like the sort of sleepy, tangential place where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid might’ve hidden away from bounty hunters for a few days. You might want to bring a book if you visit, because there is not much to do at the airport, though there is information to be gleaned at the airport’s adjacent display about local flora and fauna. I loved learning about the Catalina Island shrew, for instance, which is so tiny that human beings rarely spot one. “Weighing little more than a penny, the shrew’s heart rate can top 1200 beats-per-minute,” a sign told me. “A voracious insect eater, the shrew must consume food every three hours or die.”
The shrew and I have something in common in that regard. Famished and foggy after my morning trip from Los Angeles to Long Beach to Catalina Island to the airport, I rambled back to the restaurant and decided to eat breakfast and lunch at more or less the same time. I ordered a breakfast burrito stuffed with eggs and avocado and hash browns, and I followed that up with a cheeseburger made with bison meat. (Bison roam the grounds surrounding the airport, in fact—legend has it that they’re the descendants of some bison that were brought to the island during the filming of an old Western—but apparently I was not eating one of them. Bison meat is shipped in on a daily barge that brings all food and supplies to the island from the mainland.) Naturally, I got an oatmeal raisin cookie as well.
I ate at a counter in the dining room, which is decked out like a mountain lodge with a commodious fireplace and taxidermy. Outside the window, a sign said, “Do Not Feed Foxes.” Sometimes people call the restaurant at the airport and ask for a recipe for one of the cookies, which also come in versions such as peanut butter chocolate chip and chocolate chip walnut. Those callers are told no. Sometimes people call the restaurant and ask if it’s OK if they fly in and get lunch without paying a landing fee—this actually happened while I ate there. Those callers are also told no. And sometimes people haul their backpacks into the restaurant because they’re roughly midway through the Trans-Catalina Trail, a four-day hike across the island. After my brunch, I met one of these hikers, a guy named Carmen Rao, who was preparing to record a TikTok video about his trek. I asked him how he liked the food.
“They say hunger’s the best sauce,” he said. “So everything tastes good to me.”•
Over the years, Jeff Gordinier has contributed to publications such as Esquire, Food & Wine, and the New York Times. He recently won the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing.
