A food writer takes on the cruise ship buffet.
As a person who plans vacations around meals, the words “cruise ship buffet” struck fear into my heart. It was the sort of fear other people might reserve for getting matched against Serena Williams in a tennis tournament—a no-win situation against an insurmountable opponent.
Facing those fears, I boarded the Discovery Princess in Seattle with 3,804 other guests. I immediately indulged my culinary curiosity at World Fresh Market, the main buffet, for a late lunch before we set sail. Even as a jaded food writer, there’s an undeniable thrill of such a vast selection of food: French fries, mini-quiche, four kinds of cut fruit, roasted asparagus, seafood salad, mortadella, and focaccia bread, which is exactly what I ate that first day while taking advantage of the free drinks included in my Princess Premier package.
In my decade as a food and travel writer, I’ve actively avoided large cruises. I saw it as my job to ferret out the hidden culinary treasures people might not otherwise find, and that couldn’t possibly exist onboard a ship. But here I was, spending seven days aboard the Discovery on my way to Alaska, and any lingering hope that the jokes about cruise ship food were exaggerated had already quickly faded into the sea of blandness.
Nothing was actively bad, but nothing was good, either. It was all fine; it was functional, but I am built to crave the zap of excitement that comes from great food, and I was determined to find it somewhere among the 20-something different venues and concepts on board. I vowed to spend my many meals on board in the coming week figuring out what was actually the best, or at the least, how to navigate to the least bad food while I ogled ice formations and admired the steep sides of a fjord from my bed.
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Looking for Freshly Made Food
As we toured the ship the first afternoon, a beautifully charred half-dome of calzone caught my eye as the pizzaiolo slid it off his peel, fresh from the oven, at Gigi’s Pizzeria. What I witnessed turned out to be the key to why Gigi’s Pizzeria quickly became my favorite restaurant on the ship and the site of all my best meals: every pizza and calzone came fresh from the pizza oven.
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Making 20,000 meals a day requires a lot of preparation and batch cooking. While everything on board is made from scratch, very little of it is made to order. Sauces dull and glop and proteins go gray as they wait. But the pizzas at Gigi’s always came straight from the oven, and that freshness keeps the crisp parts crunchy, the melty parts gooey, and the gently chewy parts from going soft.
Money Doesn’t Equal Taste
My Princess Premier package meant that unlimited meals at any of the “Casual” restaurants, like Gigi’s, were included in my package, rather than incurring an extra fee. I quickly learned that it was one of the only places where paying extra was worthwhile. Princess Premier also came with “Specialty” restaurant meals, which otherwise incur an even higher fee. Two of the best bites of the entire trip came from specialty restaurants: the garlic cheese bread served at the beginning of our meal at Crown Grill, and the truffle arancini amuse bouche at Sabatini’s Italian Trattoria.
Other dishes seemed misguided: I should have sensed an issue when the waiter warned me that the steak tartare – a dish famously served raw – was only cooked a little bit. By night three, I should have known better than to order a time-sensitive dish like pasta carbonara, so that gluey mess was my own fault.
As I ate at Discovery’s increasingly expensive options, I noticed a distinct pattern: my lobster got larger, the room got fancier, but the food itself never improved. When the crustacean arrived at The Catch, the seafood specialty restaurant, its mitt was big enough to put my hand inside it. Larger lobsters are not inherently tougher, but cooking them to the delicate tenderness that is ideal gets more difficult. So, while the deep red oversized claw was beautiful, it chewed like a baseball mitt.
The Catch also offered smoke-filled cloches lifted to reveal salmon appetizers and crab-shaped bowls with a showy shell lid for cioppino. As I ate my way around the ship’s most expensive spots, I learned a valuable lesson: money won’t upgrade the quality of the food, just its ostentatiousness. The only displays of ostentatiousness I cared about came from the massive glaciers that calved with loud booms in front of our boat, collapsing into Glacier Bay.
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Craving Something Fresh
The second morning, I hit the buffet, where I realized it offered the same food I found in the dining room, only with a wider selection. The early hour meant everything was fresh and offered exciting options that don’t make it down to the more formal dining rooms. The Filipino-style garlic rice became my breakfast staple, and I often ate it with eggs bhurji–scrambled Indian-style. Bumping along the buffet, I looked for signs of freshness to find the best items–soft brioche buns, sweet bread-and-butter pudding, and made-to-order omelets.
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Breakfast also offered one of the food highlights of my week. We boarded on Saturday, and by Wednesday evening, after the overgrown lobster incident, I had hit a point of despair. I just wanted something simple, something fresh, something that burst forth with flavor, and I began to fear I would have to wait until I made it home. Then, after days of the cut fruit selection being limited to strawberries, pale pineapples, and melons, I spotted a golden crescent of mango, glistening in its own juice. It was an ideal mango, not just for a cruise ship but in general: soft, sweet, and messy, a shining beacon of flavor.
Forgiving Mediocre Meals
The fascinating part about navigating the cruise ship dining options was how it completely upended my normal rubric for judging dining. Since paying more didn’t improve the food, and everything else was included, the price offered no guidance. Instead, I had to factor in how recently it had been cooked or how it would hold up over time.
My final buffet meal looked different than my first: roasted bell peppers, which last endlessly under the heat lamp, with pasta–not the pre-sauced options, but the ones available to assemble with sauce to order–and some fried fish because I spotted it coming out of the fryer and straight to the buffet line.
After lunch, I spent the afternoon watching for orca whales from the adults-only hot tub near the front of the ship. As the warm water bubbled up and the Alaskan sun shone down, I searched the horizon for signs of whale breath spouting up. Each time a black fin arched up in front of me, it felt better than that perfect mango had tasted.
In my seven days on board, cruise ship food never magically won me over. But even I, a person who plans vacations around food, could forgive a few mediocre meals in exchange for spotting a bald eagle perched on an iceberg. While I might not be able to direct anyone to the kind of mind-blowingly amazing meals, I usually try to find on the job, at least I can help them make better decisions when faced with a buffet.
We also like to go to very nice restaurants and have been to many in Chicago and some that have Michelin stars. When it comes to Cruises , you have to lower your expectations in that sense. This is basically banquet food made for thousands of people so you cannot expect to have a dining experience like a fine restaurant. However, we have had some excellent meals, especially at speciality restaurants. Of course there is an extra fee, but I do believe it's been worth it. I think we had one meal on the celebrity eclipse where for one night they converted their Japanese specialty restaurant to Indian food. Now let me tell you that was excellent. My wife is Indian and we've had Indian food in many parts of the world, including many fine Indian restaurants in Chicago and other cities and other countries. The food on the ship that night was pretty darn good.So there are times when you can get some really terrific food on a cruise ship, but overall for the dining experience in the main dining rooms would say it's pretty good but not great. However, I do not expect Great under these circumstances.
Food quality varies with the cruise line and the ship. We've had very mediocre to excellent, and nothing bad. Eating on a land trip has become very, very expensive, even for two meals a day, and it can be exhausting figuring out where to eat every day (albeit fresher and perhaps more exciting). So there are trade-offs. I recommend a Viking ocean cruise.
If you are seeking a culinary experience on a cruise ship then you want to sail with Atlas Ocean Voyages. My wife and I recently took one of their Epicurean Experiences. They had a guest chef onboard, Ippy Iona, who owns restaurants in Hawaii with Italian and Hawaiian cuisine fusion. Also sailing with us was Master Foodie™ Mara Papatheodorou a culinary specialist and historian, formet editor at Bon Appétit Magazine. Everyday there were events, and on top of that the actual Chef of the ship was amazing.