IN PERSON
The spice is right
Chef Ravi Nage is responsible for injecting new life and colour into Emirates Airways’ new subcontinental menu. Laura Gelder goes behind the scenes to find out more
What influences have shaped your career? I was born into the airline industry! My father was a pilot, my brother a flight engineer and my sister worked for Air India. But being the youngest son I was given the less glamorous chore of helping my mother in the kitchen. I went to the market with her to help her carry the groceries and watched her wheeling and dealing. Food is ingrained into my DNA.
When did you become interested in airline catering? It was when I saw that Air France served more caviar and foie gras than any of the top hotels I had worked in that I began to see how airline food didn’t have to mean bad quality. I was approached by Gate Gourmet in Austin and went on to work at the Washington DC facility creating up to 22,000 meals a day.
Tell us about your current role? I am now regional catering manager for Emirates, in charge of the Indian subcontinent and
Ravi Nage was born in Bombay. After training in India as a chef he went on to study at the Culinary Institute of America in New York. He worked his apprenticeship at Dubai Hilton and later joined Gate Gourmet at its Washington DC facility. He is now back in Dubai with Emirates.
Africa region; the former including the Maldives, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, as well as India. I have recently been tasked with creating a new set of menus for the region.
How do you go about creating an airline menu? These days, everyone is an expert on food and the continent is so vast and diverse that you really have to know your audience so I studied the demographic of the passengers. Calcutta in East India and Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka are only 300km apart, but cuisine differs a lot. Both eat lots of seafood, but Dhaka mixes that with meat, while Hindu Calcutta is more vegetarian. Every region, state and even city has a different taste, but what everyone needs at 35,000 feet is comfort, simplicity and authenticity.
How do you test the menu? Luckily I work in Dubai which is a melting pot of cultures. I enlisted the help of many ‘testers’,
76
WWW.ONBOARDHOSPITALITY.COM
including two Pakistanti housewives who helped me pick the dishes for our Karachi flights. The three of us created a menu part-by-part, seeing what would go with what. At the end of the process I heard one of the ladies say: “This is what I would make for my husband on a Thursday night. I knew then that we had cracked it!"
What trends do you try to incorporate? There is more emphasis on health and natural ingredients combined with international flavours and colour. My menu consists of an authentic regional dish; an authentic regional vegetarian dish; a fusion dish; a western dish and an a la carte vegetable dish. Class-to-class, cabin-to-cabin there are different menus which run for one month, three times a year. To date I have created 842 menus.
What issues have you come up against? One challenge was injecting some colour into the dishes, since the food of the region tends to be red or yellow due to the cooking process. We have endeavoured to change this and one example is our paneer jalfrezi. I cooked the components separately to retain individual colour in the vegetables. To our masala-crusted prawn dish I added a roasted eggplant puree, smokey tomato emulsion and coriander garnish to give varied colour.
Is the quality of food challenged by the conditions it goes through on an airline? All our dishes are subject to the HACCP quality control system concerned with controlling food temperatures and the time dishes are exposed. When I created a chicken curry for our menu I discovered
Left: Rafi at work in the Emirates Flight Kitchen; right: Fish Macher Jhol, fish cooked in Bengali style with steamed rice and chana daal
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116