Among our piles of old assignments commissioned by clients in the eighties, I was somewhat taken aback to rediscover this interesting inflight menu. A history so recent, yet inseparably linked personal occupation to a golden era that embracing all things creative: art, food, culture, commerce, leisure, and all that make the pleasure of Flying, at the moment, increasingly a distant memory.
I share this distant memory with Ka-sing, because he is the photographer who created three of the six cover shots for this set of inflight menus. The Design company PPA approached him to produce three shots in their 1989 Cathay Pacific's autumn menus: Al Dente, Le Pain Quotidien and East 42nd Street, all commissioned to recognize, respectively the contribution of Executive Chef to the President of Italy, of France and of the White House. In the inside cover of the menu appeared these texts: In 1986 Cathay Pacific began an association with Club des Chefs des Chef (Chefs to the Heads of State). Since then culinary ideas from the high tables of state have spread quickly to the high tables of our inflight cuisine. In the CCC website, there is this motto: If politics divides people, a good table always gathers them.
Delicious, fine taste, it was a first class menu, and in most cases, where we sat would be in another cramming cabin, right next to it behind the velvet curtain.
The Raw and the Cooked, MYTHOLOGIQUES is a new column on the culture of eating and cooking, with contributions by various authors. The column name is borrowed from the title of a book by Claude Levi-Strauss. It is spontaneous, a little amusing but serious at the same time.