Alaska Airlines Is Serving First-Class Passengers Food From an Award–Winning Seattle Chef

First-class passengers flying some cross-country flights on Alaska Airlines this summer are going to get an extra perk — starting June 5, they’ll be able to get meals composed by Seattle’s James Beard Award–winning chef Brady Williams, who owns the White Center restaurant Tomo.

Morning flights between Seattle and Newark, JFK, or Regan National in Washington, DC can get a a mochi waffle and fried chicken meal, while afternoon and evening flights between those destinations will get either short ribs glazed with serrano jaew or buckwheat soba and seared ahi tuna tataki. It’s an expansion of the “Chef’s (tray) Table” program Alaska rolled out last year with San Francisco chef Brandon Jew, which highlights “celebrated chefs up and down the West Coast.”

It’s a partnership that connects Alaska to not just those chefs, but several small farms and ranches that provide ingredients for their dishes. For instance, the short ribs in Williams’s dish come from Washingston’s Klingemann Farms.

“What is really luxury, what is really first class?” says Jew. “I think it’s actually quality of ingredients.”

Alaska was already connected with Williams through its sponsorship of Tomo’s Buds guest chef series. Williams did his first tasting presentation to Alaska’s team last August and has been tweaking and refining ever since.

One challenge for Williams is that taste buds are dulled at 30,000 feet, meaning that flavors generally have to be bolder and stronger than they might be on the ground. Williams says that he leaned into umami and acid.

The resulting dishes — which I tried at a media tasting event this week at Alaska headquarters — aren’t quite like dining at Tomo. It’s more like dining at Tomo, bringing leftovers home, then reheating them in the microwave. That isn’t meant to be a dig, just a reflection of the difficulty of airplane cuisine: The dishes have to be made hours in advance (the night before in the case of the breakfasts) then reheated in a convection oven. It’s a minor miracle that anything tastes good after going through that process.

The chicken that comes with the mochi waffles is actually miraculously moist under the tempura crust. The rice cakes that come with the short ribs are stir-fried with soy sauce and rice wine and pack an umami punch. And the tuna is both refreshingly chilled and spicy enough to get your attention. (It’ll be served with the cold soba noodles to first-classers coming back from the hot, swampy East Coast.) It’s a cut above airplane food... but it’s still airplane food. If you have the kind of coin or expense account that is sending you across the country in first, you’ll have likely experienced better meals on either end of your trip.

First-class passengers can pre-order these meals before their flights; those not in first class won’t have access to any of it. But they’ll be able to avail of Alaska’s other efforts to incorporate premium PNW food brands into their flights, like Stumptown Coffee or Fremont Brewing.