If you're flying Qatar Airways out of London Heathrow, your tray table just got considerably more interesting. The Doha-based carrier has rolled out a signature menu by James Knappett, the chef-patron behind Kitchen Table in London — a restaurant holding two Michelin stars and known for a daily-changing tasting menu built on hyper-seasonal British ingredients.
The collaboration covers four dishes in First Class and four in Business Class, and it leans hard into British seafood and produce. First Class passengers get hand-dived seared Cornish scallops with candied lemon to start, then blue shell lobster with roasted cauliflower and caramelised mango, finishing with apple tarte tatin and smoked caramel alongside Tahitian vanilla ice cream. Business Class starts with Cornish crab salad served with warm apple soup and brown crab mayonnaise, moves on to a choice of roast lamb rack with sheep's yoghurt and sorrel or corn-fed chicken with clotted cream mash, and ends on a rhubarb choux bun with vanilla custard.
The menu is live now on flights from Heathrow to Doha, and the dishes will rotate four times a year in step with the airline's regular menu cycle. It falls under Qatar Airways' 'Flavours to Fly For' programme, which pairs the airline with big-name chefs for its premium cabins.
Knappett's CV explains the pairing. Originally from Cambridgeshire, he has cooked at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London, Rick Stein's The Seafood Restaurant in Cornwall, Thomas Keller's Per Se in New York and René Redzepi's Noma in Copenhagen before opening Kitchen Table in Fitzrovia, where meticulous sourcing is the whole point. That obsessive approach to ingredients — hand-dived scallops, Cornish crab — is exactly what shows up at 38,000 feet.
For travellers, this is more than airline PR fluff. Cabin food on long-haul premium routes is genuinely variable, and a rotating menu from a chef with this track record is a real reason to factor the flight into your booking decision if you're weighing up carriers between the UK and Asia or Australia via Doha. You don't need a First Class budget to taste it either — the Business Class lineup reads as the more interesting of the two menus, with that crab starter and rhubarb choux bun doing the heavy lifting. And if the meal wins you over, Kitchen Table itself is a bookable experience in London, though expect a waitlist and a price tag to match its two stars.
Worth noting: the menu currently applies only to the Heathrow–Doha direction, so passengers flying the reverse route or departing other UK airports shouldn't expect the same line-up. Keep an eye on the rotation schedule too — dishes change quarterly, so what's onboard in spring won't be what's served in autumn.
