What is the chef on board programme?
The idea is to have direct interaction with passengers and serve them what suits them best. It's now a regular feature on Continental's Delhi-New York Liberty and Mumbai-New York Liberty flights. A member of our congress of chefs, the panel that creates inflight menus, travels on the flights to supervise the preparation and serving of meals to our BusinessFirst customers.
The chef also takes feedback and discusses inflight cuisine with Economy class passengers.
What's in it for the passenger?
In an age of cut-throat competition, we have more to offer. We start with chilled champagne, wines and other alcoholic beverages, followed by four options of a three-course meal. For appetisers, one option is zucchini, cucumber and potato salad with green asparagus, red bell pepper and sprouted mung bean salad.
For the Indian palate, there's gobhi paratha. In the main course, a good choice is grilled lemon herb shrimp, bekti fish and salmon. In the Indian vegetarian selection, there's bhutta palak, gobhi mutter, pulao and dal Jaipuri.
Our sundae with hot chocolate sauce has been a popular dessert. There's a variety of snacks (dhoklas included) and, an hour before landing, an elaborate breakfast. Our crew has been trained to heat each dish right and to present it perfectly.
How do you incorporate customer complaints/ uggestions?
We analyse the food that comes back uneaten. For example, if potatoes are not being eaten, we conclude that people are consuming less carbohydrates. We have also noticed a steady rise in the demand for vegetarian meals.
What's new on the menu?
We change our menu every month so that frequent fliers don't get repeats. Of late, because we have more traffic on the India-US sector, we have introduced more authentic Indian cuisine. You've got paneer butter masala and chicken tikka masala. For breakfast, there's an option of dosa, poha and dahi as well because we have noticed a lot of Indians like curd in the morning.
What have you noticed about the Indian palate?
Indians want Indian food wherever they go and they are very particular about its authenticity. They can be called a bit conservative.
