Chef Fujun Zhao

As a Chinese chef with over a decade of culinary experience, working at a professional airline catering company like Gate Gourmet is a truly interesting cross-industry combination. After all, traditional Chinese cuisine emphasizes the "wok hei" (wok aroma), precise cooking techniques, and the freshness of dishes cooked and served immediately, which is completely different from the challenges of airline meals that require standardization, mass production, and consideration of reheating.

This certainly gives me the opportunity to present the essence of traditional Chinese cuisine in a completely new way. For example, how can I maximize the preservation of the soul of a braised pork dish or Kung Pao chicken under the limited conditions on an airplane? How can I design a menu that appeals to international passengers while still retaining the authentic flavors of Chinese cuisine? The intuition and skills I've honed over the past ten years in the kitchen are now definitely being applied to more refined research and quality control.

This transition from a bustling kitchen to a precision factory has undoubtedly given me a deeper understanding of what "cooking" truly means.