A chef in the hat

These chefs are whipping up an appetite 37,000 feet high

Updated : Nov 11, 2018, 06:15 AM IST

If someone had to ask me to point out a really good gift I received recently, it would be when I limped into an airplane with my coach class boarding pass. Just when I was wondering how my wrecked knee was going to behave on the flight, I was escorted to the hallowed space of the business class, where knees, necks, backs and toes, miraculously heal (at least temporarily), at the sight of flatbeds, 20-inch monitors, and cuddly blankets that feel like kittens.

The one good thing about economy is that there are no choices. You buckle up, lean back a couple of inches and pray that you’re bitten by a tsetse fly, so you can sleep all the way through. Upfront it’s different. There are too many things to do, as airlines go. Turkish Airlines boasts free Wi-Fi for you to inflict regular posts on Instagram and Twitter, or binge on movies on your watchlist. Or do the sensible thing, have your bed made for you and lie in it.

My attention peaked when a chef’s hat, with a chef under it, materialised from the galley. The hat seemed to be taking orders from an elaborate menu, recommending alternatives, suggesting changes to passengers in their seats. I awaited my turn.

Menus can take a complicated turn on a page ridden with choices, as mine was. What wine? What starter to choose? Should main course be fish or meat? Or vegan? Then again, opt for Indian or Turkish or Mediterranean?

That’s when the hat steps in, and as you’re babbling out your thoughts, it’s scanning and streamlining them to give you just what you thought you needed. Off to the next passenger.

That was an encounter with a flying chef 37,000 feet high. The airlines has always boasted of its Flying Chef for a couple of years now, on certain sectors. And I was especially keen to see what a chef on board can do that the regular cabin crew cannot.

To be frank, the difference is in its obviousness. The sight of a person with a chef’s hat moving around in the aisle, taking your orders, recommending a dish, suggests to one that there’s a kitchen that’s waiting for omelettes to fluff up and pastas to bubble with fresh cream. But flying chefs must constrain their talent to the presentation, and providing an eye-catching plate, which, as I discovered, was mouth-wateringly delicious. Followed of course, with an equally spoilt-for-choice-and hence-all-at-sea, to be able to pick that one piece of dessert you seem to want. No worries; the chef (scanning your face again), uncannily picks the ones you might have wanted to try.

It’s not as if the rest of the crew are merely standing by. There’s much work to be done in business class. Passengers need their beds made and unmade; their seats reclined and set upright, their noise cancellation headphones adjusted just so. Short of being tucked in and sung a lullaby to, biz class people can be an exacting lot, and the crew manages ably.

So why Flying Chefs? We’re told, it’s an add-on Turkish hospitality above the clouds, so that when your feet touch the ground in Istanbul, you’ve already been briefed about the hospitality of its people.