Should you be fortunate enough to be able to spend time before a flight relaxing in an airport lounge, it is easy to take for granted the hard work behind the scenes that goes into preparing the culinary delights on offer.
You can multiply by several orders of magnitude that intense level of preparatory effort when it comes to the Etihad First Class Lounge & Spa, which opened in May at Abu Dhabi International Airport’s Terminal 3.
This flagship incarnation of the 14 Etihad Premium Lounges worldwide is under the guidance of Alaa Riad, Etihad Airport Services’ executive food-services chef. The 33-year-old Egyptian has more than 15 years’ experience, including positions at the InterContinental Abu Dhabi, and the Ritz-Carlton, Shangri-La and Le Méridien in Dubai. He has also worked with celebrity chef Osama Sayed for Dubai TV. Along the way, he has served two UAE Presidents and countless visiting global dignitaries.
Riad has a clear vision for the lounges: he wants to move away from a catering-led approach to create a “hotel-style” experience, hiring renowned chefs. To this end, he has assembled a multinational team of 14 chefs, all of whom have undergone training at Emirates Palace.
That combined expertise, and Riad’s intentions, certainly shone through when we tried a selection of dishes at the lounge recently.
An appetiser of beef carpaccio was a perfect rectangle of wafer-thin meat. It was decorated almost like a miniature allotment, ring-fenced as it was with an outline of mustard-truffle crème, triangles of red radish protruding from the “ground” and horseradish, Fontina cheese and truffle embellishments.
The grilled monkfish, Riad’s personal favourite of the dishes on the menu, upped the wow factor even further. It was presented as two generous helpings on a bed of spinach emulsion, with lemon purée and confit lemon, finished with pea shoots and tomato oil.
Perhaps most inspired of all the creations we tried, however, was the dessert – pomegranate granite (try saying that quickly 10 times with a mouthful of the dish). Served in a cocktail glass, the pomegranate base was slathered in sweetcorn ice cream, beneath a veritable snow drift of white chocolate foam dotted with delicious chilli-flavoured popcorn. It shouldn’t have worked – but it undoubtedly did.
The freshness of the taste is no doubt aided by Etihad’s easy access to top-quality produce flown in from European suppliers twice a week – something that even most five-star hotels cannot do on such a regular basis.
“We have two aeroplanes every week for our first-class products,” Riad says. “One is on Wednesday, the items get delivered on Thursday, and one on Sunday, the items get delivered on Monday. So we have a fixed quantity that comes from Europe: our vegetables, some of our meat products, our fish. We did a lot of work with Emirates Palace to look at their suppliers [to source] local items.”
One of the biggest challenges comes from the frequency with which the lounge’s menu is updated, and the non-stop nature of serving the dishes, seven days a week.
“We replace our menu every three months,” says Riad. “We have to do it because of the regular guests always travelling.
“It’s not only the process of changing the dishes – you have to link the dishes to what’s in season in Europe or around you. The nationality of the guests is taken into mind as well.
“You don’t stop. We open in the morning and our kitchen gets a rest only when flights are not here, which is 3.30am until 4.30am, just for one hour to deep clean, then we open for breakfast, because the first flight is at 5am or 5.30am.
“You’re not running a restaurant in a hotel that’s open only for lunch or dinner – you’re running three restaurants in one.”
The breadth of the menu is a significant undertaking.
“Guests get whatever they want,” says Riad. “You can choose to eat breakfast at midnight or 4pm, it’s up to you. Everything is prepared fresh during the day. And it’s a huge menu. We have 59 items in the menus altogether. You’ve paid already for your [plane] ticket, so it’s not about money.”
aworkman@thenational.ae
