Forget You’re on a Plane With Dominique Crenn’s First In-Flight Menu

On February 1, Air France debuted menu items from the venerable French chef Dominique Crenn of three-Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn in San Francisco on select flights from its U.S. departure cities. As summer approaches, the official airline of the 2024 Paris Olympics will roll out 12 Crenn-designed dishes to more than a dozen international routes.

“When you’re asked to make a menu, you want to make sure you represent yourself on the plate,” Crenn tells me from her hotel lobby in New York City, where the airline is previewing the entrées. “I don’t like to be put in a box. I wanted to be me, to bring something different.”

Throughout nine months of research and development at Atelier Crenn, she chose to exclusively offer pescetarian and vegetarian options. “If you want a good steak, you go to a steakhouse in New York,” Crenn says, explaining that she travels a lot and doesn’t want to feel heavy when walking off a plane. Many of us can relate.

What she does want passengers to feel: like they’re sitting in one of her restaurants. “Forget that you are in a plane and think this is really good,” she says of her goal for the experience. “I want to make sure people can feel what we do.”

Like any chef embarking on in-flight food, Crenn says R&D was a long process of “understanding that cooking in the restaurant and cooking in the plane is totally different.” She describes the confines of the platter, limitations of sauces, dangers of over-salting, and challenges of digestion in the air. 

“It’s also understanding the layering of flavor that you can bring,” she says the Versailles-born chef. “For me, it was one of the best experiences to develop and be creative because you have to think differently [about] how to bring the flavor together.”

Dominique Crenn debuts 12 seafood- and vegetable-forward dishes on Air France.

On a flight from JFK to Paris-CDG, I'd choose black cod prepared with a white wine-and-shallot sauce, served alongside quinoa and sun-dried tomatoes. The cod is as flaky and flavorful as Crenn described, the tomatoes are earthy and pungent, the quinoa light and delicate — a delightful dish between a salad, two small starters, a cheese trio, a berry cake, and, of course, bread.

“It’s important to keep the narrative of who I am, living in California for so long, and to integrate those flavors together with a lot of French technique yet a lightness to it,” Crenn explains. “Hopefully we bring the French way of deliciousness with a touch of California.”

Crenn worked with the airline to source the freshest, organic, California produce and high-quality seafood possible from the farmers and partners to the airline and catering companies.

By June, Air France will offer one vegetable and one seafood dish a month in La Première and Business classes on flights from Atlanta (ATL), Boston (BOS), Chicago (ORD), Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), Detroit (DTW), Houston (IAH), Los Angeles (LAX), Miami (MIA), New Jersey (EWR), New York (JFK), Raleigh-Durham (RDU), San Francisco (SFO), Seattle (SEA), and Washington, D.C. (IAD), through January 2025.

The food is served with distinctly French products — Gavottes Crêpes Fourées (little cheese crackers delivered as the first snack), A l’Olivier vinaigrette, and Isigny Sainte-Mère butter — and paired with wine curated by Paolo Basso, who was declared the best sommelier in the world by Association de la Sommellerie Internationale in 2013. Flights to the U.S. from France feature dishes from a roster of French chefs, each introduced in the menus.

While Crenn has been asked to work with airlines before, this is her first in-flight menu, as the collaboration with Air France aligned with her French background and lifetime of travel. “For me, creativity is everything. If you get the space to challenge yourself to a different market, this is great,” she says.

The chef high-fives me when she hears I’m trying her menu aboard the Airbus 350-900 with new sliding doors at business class seats. She hasn’t experienced it yet, and I can confirm you’ll have plenty of privacy to gawk at the meal and eat all you want.