For those flying to North America with Qatar Airways, a new set of menus is rolling out across the North American network for both Business and Economy Class passengers.
They’ll be available across the Qatar Airways North American network from mid-April 2022.
Qatar Airways Boeing 777-300ER approaching Chicago O’Hare International – Image, Economy Class and Beyond
According to the airline, the new menus reflect the gateways’ local culinary influences and capture the cultural diversity across the continent while bringing in elements of Qatar’s own Arabic cuisine.
The menus will feature the fresh, local ingredients sourced from sustainable suppliers across the U.S. and Canada and rotate frequently to ensure that passengers are presented with a variety of food and beverage options. Menus on passengers’ outbound and inbound flights will be different to reflect the airline’s focus on serving local offerings and ensure passengers’ taste buds experience an array of flavours.
The airline conducted some research into local tastes. Each of the 13 North American gateways is represented in at least one dish across the newly created menus. A few examples from the airline include:
- Passengers flying from Seattle, Philadelphia or Washington DC will enjoy staples including American beef short ribs with jus, purple potato mash and sautéed vegetables; crispy duck leg confit with roasted fingerling potatoes, wild berry, lavender and braised red cabbage; and Kung pao prawn stir-fry with steamed calrose rice, baby bok choy and fried cashew nuts grace.
- Flying from New York, Chicago or Los Angeles? You’ll have things like sea bass with black rice, bok choy and soy sauce; roasted courgettes stuffed with tofu tomato relish, toasted pine nuts and cream sauce; and Philly cheesesteak panini with jalapeno chimichurri and Provolone apple grainy mustard slaw.
- Canadian passengers flying from Montreal can enjoy Canadian poutine with fresh-cut potatoes, smoked beef, gravy and curd cheese; super niçoise green salad with fingerling potatoes, anchovy, quail egg and grapefruit; gravlax salmon carpaccio with dill, ginger, shallots and fried capers; and even a Montreal pastrami bagel.
How do these translate? Well, the airline left some example images.
Business Class examples:
Economy Class examples:
Whilst the airline provided images, they forgot to tag what the images contained.
In Quotes
Qatar Airways Chief Officer Customer Experience, Rossen Dimitrov, said
“Our passengers are passionate about food, and Qatar Airways took this passion into consideration when developing our new menus for the North American gateways. We crafted the dishes to pay homage to the unique and delicious foods that our gateways are known for and to bring the comfort of passengers’ favorite foods to the skies. We put an emphasis on the quality of food we are serving to our guests, always looking to provide an outstanding in-flight experience, including the menu. We continue to innovate and use local expertise and our global vision to create top class dishes and set the standard for in-flight meals.”
Qatar Airways Culinary Development Manager, Mary-Jane Bonnaud, said:
“When creating the menu, we wanted to remain true to our key pillars and make delicious foods that are authentic, contemporary, sustainable and locally loved. We took a modern approach to ingredient combination to create dishes that are true to the local culture, unique and healthy. We worked to balance tradition and innovation to create a menu that will encourage travelers to rethink what dining in-flight can look like.”
North American network
Qatar Airways serves 13 destinations in North America from its home base of Doha, offering 100 flights a week These include:
- Atlanta
- Boston
- Chicago-OHare
- Dallas-Fort Worth
- Houston-Intercontinetal
- Los Angeles
- Miami
- New York-JFK
- Philadelphia
- San Francisco
- Seattle
- Washington-Dulles
- Montreal (YUL)
Localising the offering
Menu development for airlines is a very involved thing, with weights, portion sizes and costs measured minutely. However, within that – there is room for creativity in a menu. This can be seen most often during special events or seasons (eg Ramadan, Chinese New Year, Christmas etc).
As well as that, menus tend to be tuned for a market – and this is what Qatar Airways have done – getting local favourites and distilling them into a product that can fly as part of the in-flight service.
It will be interesting to see how the dining concepts do – both in Business Class and Economy Class – whilst business class is built for elegance and “dine on demand”, economy class is designed for the two-service special “serve everyone at once”.
As we all know, concepts are fine in theory – implementation in the real world is where the challenge lies.
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