Dominique Crenn’s First In-Flight Menu Takes Off on Air France

On February 1, Air France debuted menu gadgets from the venerable French chef Dominique Crenn of three-Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn in San Francisco on choose flights from its U.S. departure cities. As summer season approaches, the official airline of the 2024 Paris Olympics will roll out the 12 Crenn-designed dishes to greater than a dozen worldwide routes..

“While you’re requested to make a menu, you wish to be sure to symbolize your self on the plate,” Crenn tells me from her resort foyer in New York Metropolis, the place the airline is previewing the entrées. “I don’t prefer to be put in a field. I wished to be me, to carry one thing totally different.”

All through 9 months of analysis and growth at Atelier Crenn, she selected to completely supply pescetarian and vegetarian choices. “If you’d like an excellent steak, you go to a steakhouse in New York,” Crenn says, explaining that she travels lots and doesn’t wish to really feel heavy when strolling off a airplane. Many people can relate.

What she does need passengers to really feel: like they’re sitting in considered one of her eating places. “Overlook that you’re in a airplane and suppose that is actually good,” she says of her purpose for the expertise. “I wish to ensure folks can really feel what we do.”

Like several chef embarking on in-flight meals, Crenn says R&D was an extended strategy of “understanding that cooking within the restaurant and cooking within the airplane is completely totally different.” She describes the confines of the platter, limitations of sauces, risks of oversalting, and challenges of digestion within the air. 

“It’s additionally understanding the layering of taste that you would be able to carry,” says the 59-year-old Versailles-born chef. “For me, it was among the finest experiences to develop and be inventive as a result of you need to suppose in a different way [about] the way to carry the flavour collectively.”

On a flight from JFK to Paris-CDG, I’d chosen black cod ready with a white wine-and-shallot sauce, served alongside quinoa and sun-dried tomatoes. The cod is as flaky and flavorful as Crenn described, the tomatoes are earthy and pungent, the quinoa mild and delicate — a pleasant dish between a salad, two small starters, a cheese trio, a berry cake, and, in fact, bread.

“It’s necessary to maintain the narrative of who I’m, residing in California for thus lengthy, and to combine these flavors along with plenty of French approach but a lightness to it,” Crenn explains. “Hopefully we carry the French method of deliciousness with a contact of California.”

Crenn labored with the airline to supply the freshest, natural, California produce and high-quality seafood doable from the farmers and companions to the airline and catering firms.

By June, Air France will supply one vegetable and one seafood dish a month in La Première and Enterprise courses on flights from Atlanta (ATL), Boston (BOS), Chicago (ORD), Dallas-Fort Price (DFW), Detroit (DTW), Houston (IAH), Los Angeles (LAX), Miami (MIA), New Jersey (EWR), New York (JFK), Raleigh-Durham (RDU), San Francisco (SFO), Seattle (SEA), and Washington, D.C. (IAD), by January 2025.

The meals is served with distinctly French merchandise — Gavottes Crêpes Fourées (little cheese crackers delivered as the primary snack), A l’Olivier French dressing, and Isigny Sainte-Mère butter — and paired with wine curated by Paolo Basso, who was declared the most effective sommelier on this planet by Affiliation de la Sommellerie Internationale in 2013. Flights to the U.S. from France characteristic dishes from a roster of French cooks, every launched within the menus.