Gate Cuisine: America’s new gourmet airport restaurants.

I’m in Terminal 5 at New York City’s Kennedy airport, the first of four stops I’ll be making on a coast-to-coast tour of America’s best new airport restaurants. As the in-flight meal goes the way of the go-go-booted stewardess, airports are filling the void with dining options that are considerably more ambitious than the usual eat-and-run-to-the-gate fast-food and snack spots. It’s about time: As ballparks, music festivals and street carts have haute-ified their food in recent years, American airports have been stuck in a rut of cellophaned sandwiches and restaurants with names ending in “Xpress.” (Everyone’s in such a hurry, these places seem to say, that there’s no time even to spell out the names.)