Several prepared meals are displayed with wine inside the Delta Airlines Gate Gourmet facility at the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky International Airport in Erlanger, Ky. In the latest effort to lure customers and create buzz, some airlines are serving up gourmet menus dreamed up by celebrity chefs.

First-class airline passengers can say goodbye to mystery meat.

While complimentary meals have all but disappeared for most coach flights, there’s a whole new culinary landscape for first class. In the latest effort to lure customers and create buzz, airlines are serving up gourmet menus cooked up by celebrity chefs.

Travelers flying to South America or Japan on United Airlines can feast on award-winning chef Charlie Trotter’s appetizer of sauteed prawns and crispy short rib wontons with organic Thai barbecue sauce and chilled sweet-and-sour cucumber relish. Going to Europe on American Airlines? Try the rosemary-scented shrimp drizzled with garlic sauce and served with lemon rice and artichokes.

“Everything has been upgraded,” says Stephan Pyles, who is known for his creative Southwestern cuisine and has signed on as one of American’s three culinary celebrities. “Just as the customer in a restaurant has become more sophisticated, refined and demanding in terms of their food, that demand has filtered to the airlines.”

For Delta, hot Miami chef Michelle Bernstein came up with entrees, such as roasted chicken breast with goat cheese and pepper pesto crust served with polenta and ratatouille. Pair that with a wine picked out by the airline’s sommelier or shake it up with a “Mile High” mojito from Rande Gerber’s signature cocktail menu.

“Shaking the cocktails in the aisle, it’s a very exciting and cool part of the atmosphere of the aircraft,” says Jake Frank, Delta’s Director of Product Development and Delivery.

For those stuck in coach, on the other hand, an airline somelier might sound like a punchline.

Thanks to financial pressures that began with the 2001 terrorist attacks and have only worsened as fuel prices have soared, complimentary coach meals have become an endangered species. Continental is the only major U.S. airline that still offers complimentary meals – designed by their “Congress of Chefs” – in economy class for domestic travel.

While most of the gourmet action is in first class, Delta Air Lines enlisted celebrity chef Todd English to design its fee-based coach meals – a chicken bistro salad with goat cheese crostini and organic spinach for $8 – available on certain flights longer than 2 1/2 hours.

Preparing and presenting airline food still has its challenges that even celebrity chefs can’t alter. Airline meals are prepared cafeteria-style hours before they are served, and food 30,000 feet in the air doesn’t behave the same way it does on the ground.

“Just because the food is gorgeous and delicious in a restaurant doesn’t mean it will be that way in the plane,” says Bill Oliver, vice president of the Boyd Group Inc., an aviation consulting firm.