How much do you love airline food?
How often have you been on a plane, halfway through your in-flight meal, and thought to yourself, ‘Wow, this food is so great, I wish I could eat it every day’?
Truth be told, it has probably never happened. Travellers tend to view in-flight meals as a necessary evil more than a five-star dining experience. Still, one airline is so confident in the quality of their meals, they’re planning to open a bricks-and-mortar restaurant on the ground.
Budget carrier AirAsia will offer its full in-flight menu at the fast-food restaurant, which will be called Santan. Santan means coconut milk in Malay, and is a common and popular ingredient in Malaysian and Southeast Asian food. It also happens to be the name of AirAsia’s in-flight menu, which is marketed as a “gourmet in-flight dining experience”.
Pan-Asian dishes expected to appear on the restaurant’s menu will include chicken teriyaki, Indonesian rice dish nasi lemak; chicken teriyaki; and Sichuan favourite mapo tofu with rice.
“Our food is fantastic,” said Tony Fernandes, AirAsia Group’s CEO, on Larry King Now. “We believe in it so much that we’re going to start a fast-food restaurant out of it.”
There is not yet any confirmation on when or where the AirAsia restaurant might open. However, if you simply can’t wait for your next airline meal, you’re in luck. AirAsia isn’t the first carrier to offer airline food on the ground, as at the end of last year United Airlines released a cookbook for its on-board meals, allowing passengers to make their own airline meals at home.