When you’re sweating over your Christmas dinner for just 12 or 20 guests, think of Gary Thomas. When he stands in the dining room of his restaurant at 1 p.m., all is quiet. Come at 7pm, it will be extremely hot. Tables for 500 people have been placed around it. Those tables will be rotated three times during the evening. And the restaurant has two more floors. Chef Gary says approximately 6,000 people will be served within two and a half hours. This is not his only concern; There are 25 other restaurants under him. By the final cleanup, their 344 cooks and 1,700 front-of-house staff and dishwashers will have prepared, served and cleaned 100,000 meals during the day. And they’ll have done it all while sailing the blue waters of the Caribbean aboard the Star of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in history.
Chef Gary has been working on cruise ships for almost 17 years. He is now in charge of catering for Royal Caribbean, one of the world’s largest cruise companies. He oversees thousands of culinary professionals across a fleet of 29 ships and two private resorts. Those ships are getting bigger and bigger. Chef Gary has commanded catering operations on ships that were, at the time, the largest cruise ships in the world. The Star of the Seas is his 16th. At full capacity it can carry approximately 7,600 guests and 2,350 crew. It is taller than the Eiffel Tower. It has more than 20 decks, seven swimming pools, an ice rink and the world’s largest water park at sea. It weighs 250,000 tons (about five Titanics). Officially, it is powered by liquid natural gas. What really keeps the ship running and the passengers satisfied is the enormous amount of food produced by Chef Gary and his battalions of catering staff.
A cruise ship is not an airplane; There are no reheated ready meals. Meat is butchered, fish is filleted, bread is baked, potatoes are peeled, meringues are beaten, eggs are scrambled, all done aboard a ship amid the waves. “The only thing we don’t have is a live animal farm,” Chef Gary says with a smile. “But never say never.” It requires amazing levels of preparation, keen eye for detail and military discipline.
To understand Chef Gary’s operations, start not in the main dining room or one of the giant walk-in fridges, but in 19th-century France, with the godfather of the modern restaurant kitchen: Auguste Escoffier. Born into a poor family in Villeneuve-Loubet in the south of France in 1846, Escoffier was sent to work in a professional kitchen at the age of 13. It was a world away from the dazzling calm of the kitchen on the Star of the Seas. 19th century kitchens were full of noise, chaos, and drunks. Fights began to occur regularly. Escoffier was mercilessly bullied, with other cooks pushing him aside to get to the stove needed for cooking.
Then he joined the army. The experience was transformative for Escoffier and the world of professional cooking. Inspired by the discipline and hierarchy of the army, he rebuilt the restaurant’s kitchen. He forbade the cooks from drinking alcohol and instructed them to remain silent. Chef Gary is cut from the same cloth. Signs banning conversation abound in his kitchen.
Until Escoffier, the chef was responsible for the entire meal, cooking everything served on a plate. Instead Escoffier put the chef in charge of the individual components of a dish. Then a senior chef will assemble the plate of food. In this, Escoffier anticipated two other principles adopted by industrialists in the 19th century—specialization and division of labor.
All of Escoffier’s principles apply in preparing a day’s meal on Star of the Seas. Preparations begin long before thousands of diners sit down to eat. At 6 am the main deck becomes completely empty. Restaurants here haven’t opened yet and the only employees are polishing surfaces (and the odd travel influencer trying to take selfies for TikTok).
The sun is rising in the Caribbean, the clouds are the color and texture of candy floss. Take the elevator up several floors and you’ll reach the crew deck only. Randy Nichols, the ship’s inventory manager, stands waiting. His hair is neatly parted and he wears a pressed white uniform that is only slightly whiter than his teeth when he flashes his kind smile, which is often. It all starts here, with Randy.
Everything sinks except the kitchen
The elevator opens onto a corridor affectionately known as i-95, a U.S. highway that stretches more than 1,900 miles (3,100 km) from Maine to Florida. It runs the entire length of the ship, more than 300 metres. Randy’s job is to make sure that at any given time the cooks onboard do not run out of anything needed for 100,000 meals a day (there may only be 10,000 people on board, but passengers typically eat several times more “food” than humans eat in 24 hours. A running joke in the cruise-ship industry is that passengers gain a pound per day). He is in charge of 25,000 line items, including 15,000 lobster tails and 400 tons of bottled water. Not surprisingly, Randy loves spreadsheets. Material costs for a one-week trip are $1.5 million, and some sailings cost double that.
On any given day, the chefs serve up 6,800 kilograms (15,000 lb) of protein; There are chickens to debon, spatchcock, and grill; French-trim lamb, to roast or braise; From salmon to pin-bone; sea bass for fillets; Tuna for skin; The prawns begin to split and come out of their shells. This cornucopia is stored in several walk-in fridges and freezers that branch off i-95. The largest, the fish freezer, is 210 square metres, or about five times the size of the average London flat. The dry store contained two tonnes of sugar and about four tonnes of rice in 20 kilogram sacks about two meters (six feet) high. Several chiller rooms are dedicated to milk in various stages of churning: single cream, double cream, whipping cream, buttermilk, ice cream.
All are spotlessly clean. Chef Gary is not only worried about running out of food, but he is also more concerned about the safety of what he serves. Norovirus outbreak could devastate a cruise. This spring the Queen Mary 2, another luxury cruise ship, left 266 passengers ill on a four-week cruise around the Caribbean. The worst case for Royal Caribbean was on Explorer of the Seas in 2014, when 630 passengers fell ill, as well as 54 crew members. That’s why the kitchens are spotless – as clean as any hospital, claims Chef Gary.
Randy knows exactly what’s in each of them. “I always say the captain is the brains of the ship. The chief engineer is the heart of the ship. We are the blood,” he says, smiling. Chefs order from Randy’s like home cooks order from the supermarket. They use software called CrunchTime to monitor how much of each ingredient is being used at any given time by the different restaurants on the board. Randy can then use the program to make changes to his order for a future sailing.
She must place her order three weeks in advance for a Caribbean cruise; Ships sailing to Europe require ten weeks’ notice. Randy is a content oracle, parsing past orders and the demographic composition of travelers to determine what’s needed. “Americans want burgers and fries; Europeans want pasta and a variety of vegetables.” More kids means even more burgers and fries: Pity the poor chef peeling potatoes if there are going to be that many American kids on board. He remains aware of the more detailed dietary requirements that guests are asked to log when booking their cruise; Is there an unexpected glut of gluten-free buffet-warriors? A glut of vegetarians? Randy adjusts accordingly.
CrunchTime takes another of Escoffier’s innovations, the mise-en-place, and turbocharges it. Mise-en-place literally means “to place in place”. In a kitchen, at its most basic level, it involves careful calculations of what the chefs are tasked with, what they need to prepare for service and devising the most efficient courses to get it all in place. As Chef Gary was rising through the ranks he intuitively created his mise-en-place. Now CrunchTime uses artificial intelligence, historical data, and information to make predictions that employees enter daily: “It can tell us, for example, for tonight, we need 1,422 portions of calamari,” explains Randy.
Such precision matters not only because it’s essential to keep hungry cruise-goers happy, but also because, what sinks restaurants are their extremely thin margins. This is even more challenging when considering cruise-ship scale; The top three cruise lines will spend $2.5 billion on content alone in 2023. Constantly over-ordering is a recipe for stomach-churning levels of waste.
Yet wastage remains a problem across the board. The nature of the cruise buffet makes it unavoidable. Sailors who can eat everything are rarely satisfied with just one dessert; But if someone eats two or three puddings, he is unlikely to finish all of them. And food served as part of a buffet can only be left open for three hours before being disposed of for health and safety reasons. The extra food is ground into pulp. Some are thrown into the sea; Some are burnt. Enough waste is burned to help generate electricity for the water-park on the top deck, which features slides that slide passengers over the side of the ship and back again.
a boatload of food
There are three loading bays along I-95; The ship runs parallel to the pillars so more off-ramps means faster loading and unloading. At 6:30 a.m., Star of the Seas welcomes its clients to Royal Caribbean’s private island, “The Perfect Day at CocoCay.” The island’s white sandy beaches and glittering water parks stand out against the sky, washing them the color of a sweet beetroot as the sun peeks over the horizon.
Work should start immediately. Randy insists, “What they say is, be early on time. Be on time and being late is unacceptable.” Today he and his team are unloading food. But this is also where Randy selects content for on-board consumption. The pressure is even greater during loading days. If the luggage is not loaded onto the ship on time, its departure may be delayed. This either means spending more fuel to reach the next destination, or it means thousands of passengers missing out on activities booked at specific times at their next stop.
That’s why many pallets of food are already portioned into prepared, labeled and sealed containers, ready to be transported by forklift to stock restaurants on the island. Working conditions for cooks and crew during voyages are difficult at the best of times.
They work seven days a week for the entire duration of their contract, which sometimes lasts up to eight months. Chefs are usually from emerging markets such as the Philippines, Indonesia, India and South Africa. They are paid much less than the US minimum wage, and do not have access to the luxuries that paying travelers enjoy. Staying on a private island may be especially difficult for them. Almost all the food served there is prepared onboard the night before, so the chefs and crew have been working overnight for this moment.
As passengers are taken to the island throughout the day, a new shift of cooks is busy preparing for their return that evening. Chef Gary goes around checking each of his kitchens to make sure they’re in good working order. Later that evening your correspondent will be standing in the middle of the buffet, admiring the watermelons carved into lotus flowers, the grill chef cooking 30 steaks at a time, and sunburnt people crowding around the serving bowls, piling their plates higher and higher. They have no idea how much work goes into preparing all this food. Your correspondent appreciates his hard work; But more than that, he appreciates how good the food is. He makes sure that nothing of it is left to waste.
Correction (December 23): An earlier version of this piece stated that Sea Star was powered by liquid nitrogen gas, not liquid natural gas. Apologize.
