\"Good food and good wine is heaven on earth\", said Henri IV. Four centuries later, this is also true in the skies for passengers in Business and First classes, where meals happily go beyond their simple functional mission. And yet, from the elegant chiffonades enjoyed in the sleeper seats to the actual production environment of the dishes served in First and Business class, there is more than a world: there is a universe. Welcome to Servair 1, the flagship of Air France's catering subsidiary and number three in the world in this sector, behind LSG Sky Chefs and Gate Gourmet. It is the nerve centre of a company with annual sales approaching 600 million euros and 120,000 meal trays prepared daily for some 90 customer airlines departing from Orly and Roissy airports. A veritable factory overlooking the Roissy runways where, from the 'shops' where incoming raw materials are stored to the large hangar where one trolley after another is ready to leave for its flight, the strange visions of the catering industry float by, with its towers of ice buckets, its armies of cutlery stored in cash registers and its king-size jars of mayonnaise, ketchup and other seasonings.<\/p>\n
In this setting, which is more reminiscent of the mechanics of Chaplin's Modern Times than the sensual splendour of Babette's Feast, there are no safety, hygiene or process standards to be trifled with. And in both the \"cold brigade\" and the \"hot brigade\", the line cooks always keep an eye on the reference photos of the meal tray, planned down to the smallest detail by the client company. The obsession with the right replica is coupled with that of the right dosage to avoid the ultimate tragedy, once the tray reaches its final consumer: the impression that the neighbour has more on his plate.<\/p>\n
A certain glamour is not excluded from this totally unpretentious setting, however, when you leave the territory of the \"Y kitchen\" (for economy class) for the workshops of the \"J and P kitchens\" (for business and first class). Here, the preparation is more meticulous and the skills are necessarily enhanced, even if it means coming across a few surprises, such as these mini-culinary workshops run by a Chinese, Indian, Korean or Thai chef, depending on the country of origin of the customer airline. The same goes for the area dedicated to Japanese cuisine, run by chef Hayashi, who used to work in the kitchens of the Hotel Nikko on the quays of the Seine. But in the top end of airline catering, it's not just in the kitchen that you come across 'real chefs'.<\/p>\n
Airlines have found a new way to distinguish their front cabins: forging partnerships with international gastronomic luminaries. The last few years have seen a steady stream of contracts. Stephan Pyles, the head of a top Dallas restaurant, has joined forces with American Airlines; Christian Petz, chef of the top restaurant Palais Coburg, has signed up with Austrian; Michelle Bernstein, former chef of the top restaurant Azul at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami, is working on the catering for Delta Airlines' BusinessElite class, and Singapore Airlines is building a dream team of culinary consultants that includes Georges Blanc, Gordon Ramsay and Alfred Portale. Air France - and thus Servair - has also embarked on this type of partnership, working on fish with Jacques le Divellec, entrusting its wine list to Olivier Poussier - the world's best sommelier in 2000 - and above all its l'Espace Premi\u00e8re menus to Guy Martin, the chef at Le Grand V\u00e9four.<\/p>\n
Contrary to popular belief, this type of collaboration is not just about a bundle of money in exchange for a gratifying signature for a kitchen in search of dignity. \"We receive two or three weekly visits from Guy Martin's teams at the centre for inspection and grading\", points out Pascale Loth, deputy director of the Servair 1 centre. In fact, the collaboration between Air France and Guy Martin is a long-term partnership, where everything starts with a comparison of skills: \"We give them the main instructions - particularly concerning the products we cannot use - then they send us their recipes and we try to modify them to take account of our processes. They come to taste and the back and forth only stops once everyone is satisfied\", explains Michel Nugues, Head of Menu Development at Air France. For a \"top chef\" who is used to preparing a dish on demand - and in comfortable kitchens - that can be eaten immediately, the first thing to do is to take into account what Servair calls the \"special conditions of a meal deferred in time and space\".<\/p>\n
And there's no shortage of \"special conditions\" in the airline catering industry. These include preparation, packaging - the trays have to arrive on the plane in sealed trolleys cooled to 3\u00b0C - handling and the risks involved in consumption, which condemn a large number of ingredients in advance. Here are just a few examples: \"Juices are reduced or combined with vegetable pur\u00e9es, starters that combine vinegar with vegetables that go out of phase are avoided, fresh herbs and especially meat bones and fish bones are avoided\", says Michel Nugues.<\/p>\n
Another pitfall is the special drinking conditions in these cabins perched 10,000 metres above the ground. \"The notion of taste is altered in flight, particularly when it comes to appreciating salinity. We have to modify the recipes designed on the ground to give them more flavour, using a few tricks like roasting spices\", explains Michel Nugues. Nor is the job of chef in the sky free of ingratitude, since all the effort that goes into developing recipes and preparing platters can be reduced to almost nothing by the vagaries of flight conditions: \"Of course, not everything depends on us and the final consumption depends on unpredictable factors that are no longer within our control: if you make a fillet of sea bass that needs to be cooked for three minutes, but the stewardess is obliged to keep it warm because we're going through a zone of turbulence, it obviously won't be the same.\"<\/p>\n
The list of vicissitudes doesn't end there. No salt, no sugar, kosher or vegetarian: many passengers express special requests, which Servair meets through its SMC (Special Meals Catering) division. Similarly, the catering manager has to deal with last-minute changes in cabin configuration, with Servair promising on this point the feat of \"being able to respond to a change in the airline's order up to 30 minutes before take-off\".<\/p>\n
It is on this long chain of constraints that the specific nature of the in-flight catering profession rests, which prompted Servair to create the Les Toques du ciel association in 1998 in order to give it its letters of nobility and to spread a spirit of companionship in a niche that is underestimated by the general public and little known by those involved in traditional catering. \"We realised that people had the wrong idea about aeroplane cuisine. By creating the Toques du ciel, we wanted to encourage training and the sharing of specific culinary heritages to spread this idea: behind a meal tray, you have a real chef\", points out Boris Eloy, Servair's Communications Director. But the full recognition of in-flight catering has been affected in recent years by budget restrictions. Kitchens have not escaped the major rationalisation drive that has swept through the airline industry since the turn of the millennium, and when it comes to presenting recipes and menus, customers are becoming increasingly fussy about the cost of a meal. The rise in the price of paraffin has not helped matters, and airlines are now pushing their caterers to reduce the weight of the crockery on board. At the same time, everyone has tightened the screws on on-board products. And only a few Gulf carriers continue to serve lobster or caviar to high-spending passengers. All of which makes the task of those who, as Michel Nugues sums up, repeat the feat every day of \"producing a cuisine that ranges from Flunch to two-star\" even more difficult.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\"Good food and good wine is heaven on earth\", said Henri IV. Four centuries later, this is also true in the skies for passengers in business and first class, where meals happily go beyond their simple functional mission. And yet, from the elegant chiffonnades enjoyed in sleeper seats to the [...]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8401,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[1521],"type-darticle":[],"n_magazine":[],"class_list":["post-8399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aerien","tag-gastronomie","vapo-free"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n