Antonio Park Is Getting Into the Airline Food Game

Prominent Montreal chef Antonio Park has been tapped to design menus for Air Canada.

Park, who owns Westmount restaurants Park, Lavanderia, and Café Bazin, will put together menus tailored to certain flights’ destinations, according to the Montreal Gazette.

The first set of menus is to be rolled out this week on the Montreal to Tokyo-Narita route (some travellers may have already encountered menus from Park in their testing phase.) By some point in 2020, all Air Canada flights to Asia and most to South America will have menus from Park.

Park’s background — he is South American born, of Korean heritage, and runs one of Canada’s most prominent Japanese restaurants — obviously ties into the Air Canada partnerships. The Tokyo menu (the only one unveiled thus far) includes a chirashi bowl, a beef curry, deconstructed onigiri, and tamari-maple braised short ribs with shiitake mushrooms and pickled daikon.

Park’s menus will vary across flights, so it seems like the South American flights will hone in on Park’s knowledge in that realm.

Park’s menu will be available to Air Canada passengers in all classes on the Tokyo flights, even economy. That’s a bit of a surprise: These kinds of celebrity chef collaborations with airlines are often restricted to business or first class only. But not everyone will get Park’s food on all flights — it’ll only be for the moneyed business class types on the South America flights. Plus, Park is not overhauling Air Canada’s menus for other areas, such as flights to Europe or within North America.

• Antonio Park designing menus for Air Canada’s international flights [Montreal Gazette]