A food writer covers cruise ship buffets.
As someone who plans vacations around meals, the words “cruise buffet” strike fear into my heart. It's a fear that others might retain when playing Serena Williams in a tennis tournament – a no-win situation against an unbeatable opponent.
Faced with these fears, I boarded Discovery Princess Join 3,804 other guests in Seattle. I immediately satisfied my culinary curiosity with a late lunch at the World Fresh Market (the main buffet) before setting sail. Even as a jaded food writer, there's something undeniably thrilling about the abundance of food options: French fries, mini quiches, four kinds of cut fruit, grilled asparagus, seafood salad, salami and focaccia bread, which is what I ate on the first day, while enjoying the free drink included with my Princess Premier package.
In my ten years as a food and travel writer, I have actively avoided large cruises. I think it's my job to find hidden culinary treasures that people might not be able to find and that have no chance of being on a boat. But I spent seven days aboard the Discovery en route to Alaska, and any lingering hope that any jokes about cruise ship food might have been exaggerated have quickly faded into a sea of blandness.
Nothing is bad, but nothing is good either. That's all well and good; it's practical, but I'm hard-wired to crave the excitement of good food, and I was determined to find it among the more than 20 different venues and concepts on board. I vowed to spend the next week eating a lot on the boat, figuring out what was actually the best, or at least how to find the least bad food, while I stared at the ice and admired the fjord from my bed Steep sides.
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Find freshly baked food
When we toured the ship on our first afternoon, the pizzaiolo at Gigi's Pizzeria was pulling fresh pizza out of the oven, and a beautifully charred half-dome pie caught my eye. What I witnessed became the key to why Gigi's Pizzeria quickly became my favorite restaurant on the ship and the place for all of my best meals: Every pizza and calzone is baked fresh from the pizza oven.
Producing 20,000 meals a day requires a lot of prep and batch cooking. While everything on the boat is made from scratch, very little is custom-made. While waiting, the sauce becomes dull and viscous and the proteins turn gray. But Gigi's pizza always comes straight from the oven, and that freshness keeps the crispy parts crunchy, the melty parts gooey, and the chewy parts never go mushy.
Money does not equal taste
My Princess Premier package means that unlimited meals at any “casual” restaurant (like Gigi's) are included in my package at no extra cost. I quickly learned that this was one of the only places where it was worth paying the extra cost. Grand Princess also offers “specialty” restaurant meals that would otherwise cost more. Two of the best dishes of the entire trip came from specialty restaurants: the garlic cheese bread at Crown Grill and the truffle fried rice ball antipasto at Sabatini's Italian Trattoria.
Other dishes seemed misguided: I should have realized something was wrong when the waiter warned me that the steak tartare (a famous dish served raw) was only slightly cooked. By night three, I should have known better than to order something as time-sensitive as pasta, so the gooey mess was my own fault.
As I ate at the Discovery Restaurant, I noticed a clear pattern: My lobster got bigger, the room got prettier, but the food itself never improved. When the crustacean arrived at The Catch, a specialty seafood restaurant, its glove was large enough for my hand to slip into. Larger lobsters aren't inherently tough, but cooking them to the desired tenderness becomes more difficult. So, while the crimson oversized claws are pretty, it chews like a baseball glove.
The Catch also offers smokey cloches that lift to reveal salmon appetizers, and crab-shaped bowls with ornate shell lids for seafood soup. I learned a valuable lesson when I dined at the most expensive place on the ship: money doesn't improve the quality of the food, only the showiness of it. The only display of ostentation I cared about came from the huge glaciers in front of our ship, which calved with a mighty roar into Glacier Bay.
longing for something new
The next morning I went to the buffet and found that it offered the same food that I found in the restaurant, just with a wider selection. Early mornings mean everything is fresh and offers exciting options that aren't limited to more formal restaurants. Filipino style garlic rice became a breakfast staple for me and I often eat it with Indian style egg fried rice. I walked along the buffet looking for signs of freshness and found the best items – soft brioche, sweet bread and butter pudding and omelets made to order.
Breakfast is also one of the food highlights of my week. We boarded on a Saturday and by Wednesday night I was in a desperate situation after the overgrown lobster incident. I just wanted something simple, fresh, and full of flavor, and I was starting to worry that I'd have to wait until I got home. Then, after several days of cut fruit choices limited to strawberries, pale pineapples and melons, I discovered a golden crescent of mango, glistening in its own juices. It's an ideal mango, not just for cruising, but in general: soft, sweet, messy, and a shining beacon of flavor.
Forgive the mediocre meal
The fun thing about browsing cruise ship dining options is that it completely overturns my normal criteria for judging dining. Prices give no guidance as paying more doesn't improve the food and everything else is included. Instead, I have to consider whether it was cooked recently or how it will hold up over time.
My last buffet looked different than my first: roasted bell peppers that went on indefinitely under a heat lamp, and pasta—not a pre-seasoned selection but one that could be combined with sauce to order of pasta – and some fried fish as I discovered it came out of the fryer and went straight to the buffet.
After lunch, I spent the afternoon watching orcas in the adults-only hot tub near the front of the boat. As warm water surges and the Alaskan sun shines down, I scan the horizon for signs of whales blowing their breath. Every time a black fin arches in front of me, I feel better than a perfect mango.
During my 7 days on board, cruise ship food never magically won me over. But even I, someone who plans my vacation around food, can forgive a few mediocre meals in exchange for a buzzard perched on an iceberg. While I may not be able to guide anyone to that amazingly delicious meal, I usually try to find at work that at least I can help them make better decisions when faced with a buffet.
