Josh Emett on the challenge of cooking up a new Air NZ menu
Sunday, 17 May 2026
The former Masterchef judge is taking flight as Air New Zealand’s new ‘culinary ambassador’. Stewart Sowman-Lund finds out what’s on the menu - and how tastes change at 30,000 feet.
Josh Emett has worked all around the world, but now for the first time he’s taking his talents skyward.
The celebrity chef, who has picked up Michelin stars across restaurants in London, New York and Los Angeles and appeared as a judge on Masterchef NZ, has today been announced as Air New Zealand’s culinary ambassador. It’s a technical sounding title that brings with it a big job: refreshing the airline’s in-flight menu, and helping to showcase local cuisine and hospitality to the wider world.
Emett’s appointment to the role comes on the tailwind of a tough few years for those working in hospitality - not only the pandemic, but recent scrutiny of the behaviour of a high-profile local chef that has seen the wider industry under the microscope.
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Speaking to the Sunday Star-Times inside his Gilt restaurant in Auckland’s CBD, Emett says he has always tried to lead by example.
Stepping aboard Air New Zealand was a new challenge - and brand partnership - that immediately excited him.
“Anything to do with food and beverage interests me,” he says. “I love every aspect of that.”
While it may seem like crafting airline food is a completely different art to fine-dining, there are some similar principles. Put simply, it’s all down to the ingredients and the people.
“When I'm thinking about food onboard, you are considering the team that you've got, the environment that you've got, the change in the palate and the change in tastes. I love these challenges, because … I really want to understand it,” Emett says.
Surely, asks the Star-Times, with a nervous glance at the Air New Zealand communications manager sitting in on the interview, the biggest challenge is making airline food … good?
Emett, tactfully, says it’s more about trying to “get inside” the heads of travellers and working out what they want to eat.
“I do like to over think things a little bit to really get to my end destination,” he says, without even realising he has made a travel pun.
“I do that with menus [even] if I'm just simply curating the menu for a table of two on an evening, you know. So the really important things are the team - the cabin crew - because they are the people that deliver it in the air.”
To help get a better idea of what it takes to run an airline kitchen, Emett headed to San Francisco. Not just for a holiday, even if he had planned a thorough dining itinerary for when he landed; instead he spent the flight observing what most passengers never get to see.
“I did the service just quietly behind the scenes with the team so that I really understood that front end part of the process, because I'm dealing with the back end part of the process, which is producing the food. So what are their challenges? How fast is the service? What equipment are they using?” he says.
“Unpicking all of that, and then getting down to the fun stuff, which is: what are we going to cook?”
Emett teases a few of the options, including a lamb rump with fresh harissa that he says is “tried and tested” and pulled from his “Rolodex” of favourite meals.
There’s also a seared venison with golden kūmara chutney, kawakawa spiced beetroot and toasted pinenuts, as well as smoked kahawai mousse, red onion and celery pickle with toasted sourdough.
But what’s delicious on the ground might taste a little different in the sky.
An airline menu involves a little bit of science, says Emett. Your taste and smell are a “bit numbed” when you're in the air at 30,000 feet.
“One of the first questions I asked was: What impacts food at altitude? You are preparing the food in advance, but that is no different to what we do here [at the restaurant]. Some dishes that we prepare here are four or five days out in a series of steps that get us to the final destination.
“It takes five minutes to send the food out, but it's taken us five days to get there. That's very normal in a restaurant. It's called being organised.”
Emett says he likes to prioritise clean, simple flavours. He thinks it’s a good thing that food in general is a little less fussy these days.
“I think people are naturally moving back to … leaving things alone a little bit.Simplicity always, for me, wins over,” he says.
“I don't like eating finicky.”
Emett says choosing to partner with Air New Zealand wasn’t a response to the tough few years the hospitality industry has just emerged from. He likes to do a “reasonable amount of things” outside the proverbial kitchen.
However, the “back end of Covid was really tough”.
He continues: “We just worked on our businesses solidly for probably [the last] 18 months, where we didn't move too much, didn't do too much, and we really focused on running our businesses in a certain way.”
Making sure the books are in shape won’t win you any awards, says Emett, but it’ll make sure your business stays afloat.
“I've always had a bit of a commercial brain in terms of food and beverage and restaurants and that sort of thing as well. Less romantic than when I started out anyway, because, you know, romance only takes you so far,” he says.
It’s something he wishes more chefs were taught to do. Asked how he feels the industry has changed over his career, especially in light of recent allegations of improper behaviour levelled at celebrity chef Vaughan Mabee from Amisfield, Emett says he figured out early on that if he wants to maintain a team and run an excellent business, there are “certain ways of doing that and there's certain ways of ruining that”.
In hospitality, people often aren’t put through management training, which Emett says can create issues.
“You're either taught to cook or taught to serve … you're not taught to manage a team,” he says.
“We try and teach our teams and train them to be capable of running their own businesses one day, to give them the tools to do that.
“We assume that our chefs should be able to cook … but [it’s] really important to us that they understand the financial models of the business, so they sit in on all our team meetings.”
Emett, who worked for 11 years under the watch of Gordon Ramsay, admits he has worked in “some really tough environments”.
The pair missed each other when Emett was last in the US, though they “message every now and then”.
For now though, Emett is focused on ensuring that Air New Zealand gets what they need from him. He views Air New Zealand as acting as “Brand New Zealand”, and with his menu onboard, that’s now partly his responsibility.
He still gets anxious about any new venture.
“It's just a matter of taking the time and making sure I'm organised. I know that I've done the groundwork, I've done the research, and go into it extremely well prepared, and then I'm comfortable,” he says.
The full menu will be onboard from October on all long-haul flights out of Auckland and on select services from North America - though only for premium economy and business travellers.
Yes, those of us stuck down the back in economy will miss out. But Emett says there has to be a premium food and beverage offering available to help distinguish the different seats.
And even Emett says he flies economy - well, “every now and then” at least.