Garuda revamps inflight dining

Garuda revamps inflight dining
By admin


Garuda Indonesia’s fresh new menus for Economy, Business and First class was launched yesterday, bringing a vibrant new approach to inflight dining.

The dining concept was based around the idea of making food more like a five star hotel, with inspiration coming from Indonesian, Japanese and modern European cuisines.

Garuda invited members of the travel industry to sample a variety of First Class dishes, which ranged from Japanese delicacies from the degustation menu, to marinated lamb and a coconut ice-cream for dessert, all prepared by executive in-flight chef Ade Kurniawan.

“As an Indonesian airline, we have to feature Indonesian food, but we have also included options like Japanese Kaiseki, modern European and a la carte options,” vice president of in-flight service Lou D’Alessio said at the launch.

“Every long-haul flight will now have our world-class chefs on board.”

And the airline isn’t lying, with recent headhunting taking the company as far as the UAE to seek out the top Indonesian chefs working in five-star hotels, and bringing them home for this new venture.

Each chef was required to have five or more years’ experience as a sous chef in five-star hotels, with 125 new chefs brought back from the Middle East, before receiving additional training as cabin crew.

Following the recent Skytrax Best Crew 2014 award, Garuda is working to close the gap between dining on land and dining in the air.

“It doesn’t look like an aeroplane,” D’Alessio said. “We wanted to break all the rules airlines have, like equipment should be tiny and plastic.”

Garuda’s team handpicked glassware, cutlery and plates from destinations like Japan to be used in its new dining concept, with chefs on board each long-haul flight over five hours to plate up the dishes.

“We felt that we had to have real chefs to put it all together inflight,” D'Alessio said.

“These chefs are extremely passionate. Indonesian hospitality is fantastic, so it has been a pleasure to bring this to our passengers.”

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

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