Neil Perry looks to redesign Qantas international food service
After many months of charity food preparation and delivery, Neil Perry is now turning his attention back to Qantas’ food service.
With lockdowns ending across the country, it looks like Qantas is ramping up its flight service and eyeing international services, which means more meals on board.
For Perry and Qantas it will be like starting a whole new service.
“Alan [Joyce] has this really great way of saying it — when we get to international, we’ll be starting a new airline for all intents and purposes,” said Perry.
During lockdown, Perry was delivering food to those in need, with 1,247 meals soon to be dispatched from his charity kitchen Hope Delivery, which operates out of Rosetta restaurant in Sydney.
These meals will be delivered to migrant chefs and kitchen hands who lost their jobs during the pandemic in Sydney and Melbourne.
“The one thing that’s been gratifying has been doing the charity, and giving people who’ve slipped through the gaps something to eat in this difficult time,” says Perry.
However, it’s also time to resume business and the chef is excited about what the future holds with Qantas.
“You know the old saying? ‘You get one chance at a first impression’. We want to get the airline back in the air with the best possible experience for our various groups of travellers. With the food and service especially — we’ve been able to have a really good look at what we want to do, and we’re making sure we’re doing something that’s interesting. We want [passengers] to be really blown away.”
Perry has been designing Qantas menus since 1997, when he requested full creative control of the menus so the venture could be a true collaboration and not simply one where he was an ‘ambassador’ or ‘consultant’.
By Qantas agreeing, it allowed him to control “the flow and ebb of how the menu reads, and how you dine with it.”
Perry creates up to 880 dishes a year for the airline’s First Class, Business Class International, Business Class Domestic classes and Lounges.
Irit Jackson, 25th November 2020
