CM Airways - Flight 1695

London

November 2025

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Cafe Mortel Airways was a death-awareness dinner disguised as an airline experience, a surreal in-flight journey where gastronomy, ritual and performance merged to explore how we live, travel and ultimately depart.

 

Created in collaboration with Selfish Studios by Ashleigh Halliburton, the dinner unfolded as a fictional flight, reimagining the familiar choreography of air travel: boarding, safety briefings, service rituals and class divisions. Beneath the humour and theatre, the experience delivered a quiet, incisive truth: whether we fly economy or first class, we are all travelling toward the same destination.

 

The menu was conceived by chef Felix Reade, whose career has spanned Lyle’s and St John before his move to France, where he led Auberge de Chassignolles and later La Mercerie in Marseille. He now creates bespoke culinary experiences for brands and high-profile individuals, including recent events for Loewe, Fred Again and Celeste.

 

Sound and atmosphere were shaped by award-winning film music composer Liam Colomer, whose score guided guests through each altitude and deepened the emotional arc of the flight.

 

Throughout the evening, passengers moved through a curated sequence of tastes, gestures and symbolic moments that transformed a familiar setting into a meditation on mortality. Cafe Mortel Airways invited its guests to confront the inevitability of the end with clarity, curiosity and beauty.

 

A journey for the living, inspired by the destination we all share.