My colleague and I had been on enough business trips to know the drill. You check in, you find your seat, you mentally prepare yourself for whatever culinary crimes the airline is about to commit against a chicken breast. We were heading to back to Turkey, an exciting destination, less exciting prospects for the journey itself.
Or so we thought.
We were flying Business. Naturally, we did what any self-respecting professionals do in Business Class: immediately accept the proffered glass of bubbly and set phasers to smug mode. From our plush pods, we watched the passengers board the “back of the bus”, the doors to manual and cross-check blah blah blah. As we took off, we could hear the dulcet tones of a man somewhere in the depths of the Economy cabin, locked in passionate negotiation with a cabin crew member over the fundamental injustice of his bag being stored 15 rows away from his seat. Something about his human rights being breached. The cabin crew were unmoved. We turned back to our champagne. As if we were a world away.
Which, give or take a curtain, we were.
And so begin the ancient ritual of in-flight meal preparation – the loading of trays, the rustling of foil lids, and most importantly, the aggressive use of the microwave. Beep. Beep. Beeeep. The symphony of reheated aviation cuisine. Nothing says fine dining quite like the smell of nuked pasta wafting through a pressurised cabin.
We clocked it all. We were not fooled.
And then something totally random happened and we were transfixed from start to finish…
One of the cabin crew, disappeared. Poof! He vanished behind the galley curtain like a real life magician. My colleague and I exchanged glances. Had he gone for a lie down? A quiet existential crisis? Entirely understandable. The anticipation was palpable.
Dramatically, he reappeared wearing the most enormous floppy chef’s hat either of us had ever seen. With the je ne sais quoi of a man who had most definitely trained in Paris, he glided down the aisle and placed our microwaved meals before us, with a Turkish-accented “voila!”. He may even have done a slight bow. I can’t be certain. The hat was so tall and so mesmerising, it was interfering with my field of vision.
My colleague and I stared at our plates. Then at each other. Then at the hat. The hat of a man who had committed entirely, spiritually and sartorially, to the fiction that we were not currently eating reheated pasta in a metal tube somewhere over Bulgaria.
We lost it completely. Proper eyes-streaming, other-passengers-judging-us laughter.
Full marks to Turkish Airlines for commitment. The meal itself tasted exactly like it had been microwaved, because it had been microwaved. The experience was unforgettable.
The hat turned out to be the secret ingredient.
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