Akasa Air has added a Parsi touch to its inflight menu this festive season, with Café Akasa — the airline’s buy-on-board dining brand — unveiling a limited-period Navroz special timed to the Zoroastrian New Year.
Article by Jolyon Zivkov | The Traveler
The Navroz meal joins a growing calendar of festival specials that Café Akasa has been rolling out across the year, with past editions built around Diwali, Easter, Yoga Day, monsoon season, and Onam, among others. Following that same pre-bookable, gourmet-style format, the Navroz special is served at cabin temperature and typically paired with a beverage, with pricing, calorie counts, and allergen information listed alongside the rest of the carrier’s gourmet menu.
For a cuisine best known for its delicate balance of sweet and sour, its gentle use of spice, and a history that blends Iranian Zoroastrian roots with Gujarati and wider Indian influences, a spot on a national airline’s festive menu is a small but welcome moment of visibility. Café Akasa has already been experimenting with regional flavours elsewhere on its menu, from coastal-style chicken wraps to street-food-inspired snack boxes, and the Navroz special leans into the celebratory, comfort-forward textures associated with Parsi home cooking, adapted to the practicalities of being served at altitude.
Akasa Air has been fairly open about using Café Akasa as a point of difference in India’s crowded domestic aviation market, where buy-on-board dining is now standard. The airline’s menu documentation goes further than most, with calorie counts, allergen disclosures, and grammage listed for individual items, and seasonal specials like the Navroz meal sit on top of a base menu of salads, fusion wraps, croissant sandwiches, and celebration cakes. Regular favourites, including the airline’s signature croissants and ready-to-eat Indian staples, stay on the menu throughout, so the festive additions are there for those who want to try something new rather than replacing what passengers already reach for.
Industry watchers see the rotating festival menu as serving a double purpose: it gives returning flyers a reason to try something new each season, while giving the airline a low-cost way to test flavours and ingredients that might later earn a permanent place on the menu. It is also, in its own modest way, a small nod of recognition for a community that rarely finds itself represented on a mainstream inflight menu — a reminder that Navroz is being marked, quite literally, at 35,000 feet.
