I know, I know. The breakfast menu at Beecher’s in Terminal C tempts you with promises of preflight mac and cheese. Floret, in A Concourse, has its latte and cinnamon roll game on lock. But when I find myself at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for a morning flight, I only have eyes for one breakfast.

Honestly it comes from the same chain that powers my workdays whenever I can justify spending $20 (with tax and tip) on a salad.

In culinary terms, "airport breakfast" is about as appealing as "reheated gruel" or "expired headcheese." But Sea-Tac has brought in a bunch of local restaurants over the years. The airport requires its food vendors to serve breakfast items, even if they don't offer morning menus at their regular locations. Thus the Evergreens counter in the Central Terminal dishes up a pair of quinoa bowls that follow the same modular format as its midday salads: easy to customize, heavy on protein and vegetables. (I have not investigated the menu’s third breakfast option, a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal.)

My travel destinations tend to revolve around eating. En route, I’d rather stick to something nourishing and save the caloric blowouts for after my arrival. Also, even the sturdiest protein bar or tote bag full of snacks doesn’t fill you up for longer hauls, like the trip to Belize my family took there in February after Alaska began its direct flights.

Apparently, I’m not alone. The fast-casual chain’s Sea-Tac location “does probably two and a half times the volume of our second store,” says Evergreens CEO Ian Courtnage. “It’s both logical and surprising.” Portland’s airport also has an Evergreens, though it’s not open for breakfast.

On later flights, I’m not above carting a cobb or spicy kale caesar onboard to get some greens in my life before a string of (literal) destination dinners. But when I'm at the airport before 10:30am, I mostly stick to the southwest bowl, made with cubes of frittata and steak, plus spinach, tomatoes, corn, black beans, and a restrained amount of diced jalapeno and white cheddar. It all gets a subtle dash of cilantro-lime vinaigrette. If Evergreens ever decided to sell its dressings, I'd show up with an empty growler on day one.

Like its mainstay salads, the quinoa bowl tastes like something healthy you might have made at home…if you had lots of time, a full refrigerator, and a freewheeling sense of flavor balance. At $9 it’s also a hell of a value compared with other airport meals.

Customers can also build custom quinoa breakfast bowls. (The company used to have quinoa as a salad ingredient in its non-airport stores, says Courtnage, but supply chain freefall ended that last year. This fall, Evergreens will bring it back, with a new menu of quinoa and rice bowls at all its stores.)

Lines at the best Sea-Tac food places can be bonkers, so it's nice you can mobile order, just like at a traditional Evergreens. Given the tight timeline of a travel morning, being able to sail past the line is often the difference between a warm quinoa bowl and a sad in-flight protein bar. Very few people mobile order at the airport, says Courtenage; at a typical store roughly half the orders come in this way. At Sea-Tac “it’s like sub-10 percent”—mostly savvy airport workers and airline employees.

Now, if only they served coffee.