For most cruise passengers, dining is a fundamental part of the onboard experience – not due just to food’s essential importance, but also to the nature of its enjoyment at sea. On a cruise ship, dining takes place within a cocoon of painstaking service, wide menu choice and liberating inclusiveness. Naturally, then, the industry’s food and beverage managers have conceived of making eating and drinking onboard as enjoyable and memorable as doing so ashore.
Accordingly, those managers – especially those from the higher-end premium and luxury lines – are racing to meet guests’ ever-higher dining expectations with dramatic changes in menus, product sourcing, logistics and provisioning.
Royal Caribbean International is ringing the changes as it puts the finishing touches to its culinary strategy for the Quantum-class ships ahead of the launch of Quantum of the Seas in November. Under the all-encompassing title of Dynamic Dining, the line will offer Quantum-class guests a greater number of distinct dining options than on its other ships (18 in total, including five full-service main restaurants), along with greater flexibility thanks to the absence of set dinner times or mandatory formal nights. Three of the new restaurants will feature award-winning chefs.
President and COO of Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd, Adam Goldstein, explains: “Our focus is intensively and uniquely on bringing the culinary concepts of the Quantum Class alive in the main traditional dining room experience, the five complimentary restaurants, and the various chef relationships that we have. This culinary programme is the most ambitious in our history and arguably the most ambitious in the history of cruising.”
In the luxury segment, guest expectations have risen noticeably in recent years, says Toni Neumeister, VP food and beverage operations at Crystal Cruises. This is reflected in the food and beverage strategy on the line’s two luxury vessels, Crystal Symphony and Crystal Serenity.
“I think there’s been more of a revolution in tastes in the last 10 or 20 years than in the last 50,” says Neumeister. “Celebrity cooking TV shows, star chefs’ participation on culinary cruises, new restaurant types, both aboard and shoreside – people travelling more than ever, trading recipes, sharing techniques and knowledge on the internet – so much of this has hugely affected the business of serving our guests.”
Cruise lines have noted well that guests now hanker for the types of cuisine and service found in unique shoreside restaurants and eateries, from cafés and food courts to more traditional, exclusive, intimate watering holes.
“The changes are very clear to us,” says Michael J. Smith, SVP marine hotel operations, Holland America Line. “At this point, guests’ knowledge of food has developed acutely in step with the tremendous changes and trends ashore, so that we’re trying to emulate these types of new dining aboard our ships.” A case in point, says Smith, is Holland America Line’s Dive-In Burgers. “There’s definitely a trend away from more formal European-style dishes toward more casual comfort food, even street food. So we introduced some food truck concepts, you might say. Like our burgers around the pool...kind of following both the food truck and shake shack trends of Danny Meyer. We’re not giving guests a burger and a bun so that they can go forth and put their condiments atop it; the burger is complete when presented to a guest, and includes a secret sauce, our Dive-In sauce. Also, they’re topped with frizzled onions and/or apple with smoked bacon…So it’s very much as if you had approached a food truck on the street and been handed an item and everything’s been done for you.”
Likewise, says Smith, the Italian restaurant onboard the line’s 15 ships, Canaletto, previously focused on traditional Italian dishes such as pasta, veal piccata and chicken cacciatore. In the last year, however, “the menu evolved to include a ‘small plates sharing’ concept – which happens to be very big in cities such as Seattle and New York. The dishes are smaller, so a couple orders four or five of them. They’re placed in the centre of the table and you share them with your partner. Porting this to Canaletto was really a different tack for us – indeed, in a way, that’s why it’s been so successful. It’s something not really seen on our ships ever before. It certainly doesn’t follow from what we’ve been doing in the main dining room. Yet this introduction has made the ship an even better, more alluring destination, so to speak, for our guests.”
For Seabourn cruises, the revolution in expectations has had an impact on some, not all levels, notes Chris Prelog, VP of hotel operations and fleet purchasing. “Today’s new informality, while remarkable, is not that significant to our menu choices. Yes, going back 10-15 years in the restaurant industry, if you went to a formal restaurant, you donned a black suit and tie. You can still do that today. But there are also a lot of high-end informal places – such as Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s ABC Kitchen in New York – where one can have a very nice, high-quality dining experience, but the wait staff is running around in jeans.
“By contrast, on cruise ships, there are still formal nights, which mean that guests dress up and go into a restaurant. That obviously impacts the nature of the menu choices that we present – it continues to have a significant impact on the food choices we’re serving. At least on the formal nights, everything is ‘geared up’ menu-wise, which also impacts provisioning.”
Provisioning has certainly changed along with the revolution in guests’ expectations. It now requires an ever-increasing number of products and, equally clearly, ever-greater expense. “In most instances, you can have nearly anything that’s on land delivered to a cruise ship,” says Neumeister. “When there are new products on the market, you first have to source these products, then find them, then determine if and when you will buy them.” He adds that many would be surprised to learn how this process works behind the scenes. “The food companies are actually quite heavily involved in driving these new trends, utilising their test kitchens and sponsoring a lot of star chefs to promote their products, which does not help costs.”
Royal Caribbean is deploying the star power of popular British chef Jamie Oliver to enhance the Quantum dining experience. Goldstein says he especially likes the combination of food and lifestyle epitomised by the brand’s partnership with Oliver. “The culinary reveal we did in New York was a huge success. The amount of publicity that we’ve gained just from Jamie’s Italian in the UK and Ireland from around the world is extraordinary, way beyond anything that I would have expected.”
Underpinning the fanfare around the famous faces that lines deploy to attract cruise guests is a highly organised logistics infrastructure. The cruise industry’s food and beverage managers have understandably applied technology to master the new, highly dynamic environment for provisioning. “Basically provisioning sits on our central IT system,” says Prelog, “and we have very carefully husbanded our historical consumption data. At the same time, our marketing and sales team does an excellent job of selling our ships. So we can almost always expect a full ship. That means that, although there are certain special elements for provisioning any voyage, the task is usually made easier. The IT infrastructure allows us to look into any voyage on any continent, any ship at any time, and forecast the quantities we need – depending, of course, on the vessel and the loading plan, which we also must devise.
“The system gives its intelligent suggestions. We then initiate a process of having that reviewed onboard by various people who are responsible for food-and-beverage provisioning. So provisioning orders are created onboard the ship and then return back to the head office in Seattle, where a ship’s buyer, quite expert on the purchasing front to say the least, reviews the order one more time. The buyer then sends it out to demand operations. It’s a very structured process, but it ensures that our knowledge and expertise continuously inform our decisions.”
The new food-and-beverage environment logically complements the desire of onboard hotel staff to meet guests’ special requests wherever possible. Fulfilling unusual requests has always been the hallmark of a great hotel team, especially on the premium and high-end ships, whether it simplifies or complicates provisioning, according to Smith.
“We do have separate menus for different cuisines. For instance, we have a full Indian vegetarian menu aboard the ships, because in the summer months up in Alaska, we’ve found we get quite a big number of Indians from Canada. These are guests with strict vegetarian needs…so we do a lot of vegan menus. Those are some of the standardised requests that we have adapted our menu content to satisfy.”
Smith indicates that one can hardly overestimate the logistical challenges of provisioning – in Holland America Line’s case, for a mainstream contemporary premium voyage of about 2,000 guests. “Our six largest ships are about 2,200 in capacity. Then there’s anything from 1,200 to 1,600 capacities among the remainder. From a provisioning point of view, it’s all about logistics and where you can get the containers to be sent; or, alternatively, whether the provisions can be sourced locally or otherwise shipped in without a container vessel.
“There has to be an infrastructure wherever the ships are turning. We certainly have itineraries that are more far flung than some other cruise lines that mainly operate in the Caribbean, for example. To some extent we develop itineraries that enable us to provision the ships at the lowest price.”
This article appeared in the Autumn/Winter 2014 edition of International Cruise & Ferry Review. To read the full article, you can subscribe to the magazine in printed or digital formats.