How This Cruise Cooks 6,000 Luxury Meals Every Day | Ship Shape

It's 6pm and the kitchen is just about to start prep for the dinner rush. Dinner in the grand dining room is served between 6.30pm and 9.30pm. The pressure is on. And every meal has to be perfect. This is Oceania Vista, a floating gourmet palace that stretches nearly two football fields in length and weighs almost as much as the Eiffel Tower. Home to 800 crew, the ship serves 6,000 luxury meals every day to 1,200 guests. With 15 decks, 12 dining venues and kitchens that never sleep, it's a marvel of floating culinary engineering. The ship runs on a 28-day rotating menu cycle with over 700 different dishes served each day, ensuring no two days at sea ever taste quite the same. Oceania Cruises is the only cruise line in the world with two master chefs at the helm, boasting a ratio of one chef for every eight guests. This cruise line has been created by foodies, run for foodies and for foodies. But behind this culinary feat is a marvel of onboard logistics. It is basically like a Swiss clock running all the time, you know. So it runs 24 by 7. At 3am, the dough mixing begins. Around 230 croissants and pain au chocolat are baked fresh, along with around 150 danishes and muffins. Everything must be ready, proofed and freshly baked for breakfast. The 28-person pastry and bakery team is led by corporate pastry chef Jose. In the morning we bake at six o'clock, so for the first guest come for the breakfast, eight o'clock we bake another bunch to make sure they are fresh baked. We have every day about 15 kinds of bread for all the ship, fresh made. You can listen the alarm. Have the fresh baguette. The team uses 200 kilos of flour, nearly 80 pounds of butter and 175 pounds of sugar for the pastries alone. But croissants are the highlight of breakfast. So this is the croissant dough and you can see all the layers of the batter inside. We just use it here in the machine to roll it. So we cannot roll straight away one time, always the dough is going to be break and stick on the machine. And we just cut. Most of the ships we have a cutter, so we cut them with a knife. For all the pastry items we are using a flour that is coming from one very specific mill in France. And we're carrying this flour around the world and it's to get all the time the same product, the consistency, the same taste. So you can see now the croissants are freshly baked out of the oven. So they look beautiful the same way like if you will be in France. And I'm going to show you inside. Look at that. And look at the bubbling. This comes from the layer of the butter. If the butter stay in your hand, that's a good croissant. The perfect croissant. It's hot, be careful. When I was a little boy, I'm going to the bakery in my village where I grew up and buying the bread. And arriving home, it was half was already missing because I had all of it. Exactly the same, exactly the same. While guests enjoy breakfast, for the kitchen staff, the day shifts into planning mode. Across all 12 dining venues, the team prepares 700 different dishes per day with rotating menus. Making a menu is not only putting together a list of dishes and just trying to come up with recipes. It's more than that. It's finding the right balance in the menu, but also the right recipe with the right technique. Guests can dine in any of the ship's eight restaurants, from Jacques's classic French cuisine, to Toscana's homemade pastas, to the open-air Terrace Café. Menus are planned months in advance. Average, the window that we are looking at is minimum three months. By July, we are already securing the quantities of turkey for Christmas. It's not like you make turkey in December. As dinnertime approaches, kitchen and waiting staff have to be briefed. OK, how was the feedback yesterday about the guest chef dish? Excellent, yeah? The head chef meets with the waiting staff to go over tonight's service. So we're going to start with a pan-fried foie gras. It will be a Deauvresol. So the dessert is going to be a French meringue. The schedule is as tight as a ship's clock. Every plate forecast, every ingredient counted. Tonight, we have the tagine. After, we have an appetizer, which is going to be a lobster croquette. We're going to have the beetroot tonight. Beetroot salad served with a little bit of goat cheese on the bottom. We have also a beef tenderloin. Of course, tonight we're going to have a risotto, a vegetarian risotto based on vegetable stock. We're going to have zucchini, carrot batonnet. We're going to have a veal popiette. So veal popiette is going to be a kind of scallopini with the stuffing meat inside. I think we're pretty good for tonight. Wish you a wonderful service. And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to stop us. And any special order, come to see us on the main galley. OK? Thank you. Bon service. At the same time, the galley starts heating up. Dinner time is the kitchen's most intense period. A dinner service spans for three hours with hundreds of a la carte plates leaving the kitchen. The menu is planned, the kitchen is ready to go. But before the cooking starts, the head chef must ensure that every dish is up to standard. All right, good evening, guys. Tonight, dinner at 11. Let's start in the gold galley, please. Good. Make sure it's all in the ring. Few portions at a time, yeah? Reduce your consommé a little bit more. Same for the beef. OK? Next, salad. Salad's good. Make sure you have enough dressing. Main course. Risotto, we need to cook a little bit longer. OK? Octopus. Make sure it's warm on the plate. Roasted lamb. For the sauce, let's reduce the sauce a little bit more. OK? Your sauce is missing a little bit of seasoning. The belletine is nice. Make sure it's nice and golden. Bring in the potatoes, we can cook a little bit longer. Very nice. However, very important, it needs to be extremely hot. The fries, let's make sure they're crispy. OK, guys, a few corrections to be made. Let's make sure they're done before service. We expect a quiet night tonight. Terrace Cafe being a little bit more busy, so let's make sure we have everything ready. And other than that, good tasting. Let's just fix a few details and we're good to go. All right, have a good evening. Thank you. Before cooking starts in the galley, Chef Eric makes one last check. It's 6.24. We have six minutes to go before the first guest enters the dining room. And as you can see, there is no food on the line. It's like it will happen like magic. As soon as the first order comes down, the food will start to come up. All the boys, you see, they are taking place in their stations. They are ready to receive the first food from the production area and to start preparing the plate as it goes. Tonight, we expect about 400, 450 passengers. The grill is empty. They're going to start. All side orders are already pre-portioned, but they are just blanched. They are not cooked completely. And all the vegetables on the line, they are starting to prep now. And they are going to provisions. So time after time, the service here. See the pasta station here, right? And two orders, we are going to prepare the dish a la minute. We have the entremetier that is finishing the cooking, the seasoning of all vegetables. And side order a la minute. Five minutes, the first order are going to arrive in the kitchen. Everybody is in position. Everybody is just waiting for the order. They all know exactly what they have to do. And every single chef on the line has a very specific function. We have two very, very intense service, which is very, very demanding. The clock ticks 6.30 and things begin heating up in the kitchen. As the dining room springs up, chefs spring into action. In the galley, the pressure is on. Every meal has to be perfect. Chefs move through their stations, carefully sourcing and plating dishes, while waiters make their way through narrow corridors to deliver meals to the dining room. This carefully choreographed process happens every day for the 10 days that the ship is at sea. And its 1,200 hungry guests will consume 6,000 pounds of lobster and 3,500 pounds of prime rib. In just one month, guests aboard Oceania Vista will go through 14,000 bottles of wine. Hello, my name is Fernando. I'm the head sommelier on board Oceania Vista. On board, we carry 30,000 to 40,000 bottles of wine, and that will only last us 10 days. With over 300 labels on board and wine sourced from every continent, the wine list travels as far as the ship does. We have something for all types of palate and all tastes. We have, you know, classic wines from the U.S., we have some Spanish and Italian, but also we have wines from Austria, from Chile, from South Africa, some producers that are not overly popular. It starts with planning and preparing all the wine events that we may have for a day. Sometimes we do have some private parties that involve wine, and of course ensuring that we have all the correct wines for the lunch and dinner service on board. We sit down with the cellar master and we taste both the wines and the food, trying to come up with what's going to be a great pairing, but at the same time, what's going to be surprising, what's going to be something exciting and not just the classic stuff. Champagne is the unsung hero of the wine pairing on board. People see champagne as the drink before the drink, it's what you drink while you're waiting for your meal. But in reality, champagne can be the perfect pairing for the entire meal. It goes well with appetizers, with your main course, and even with desserts. If you've never tried, for example, champagne in a fruit tart, absolutely beautiful. I'm going to show you how to open a bottle of champagne like a professional sommelier. The first part is removing the capsule. You'll see that top and you just pull the tab all the way through and remove that. You have the cage, the wire that is protecting the cork, stopping it from jumping away. We'll take that tab down and you will pull it until you can feel that it has been released. Now, here's a part where most people actually make a mistake of removing the thumb, unprotecting the wire and taking the risk of the cork jumping away. What we sommeliers do is simply we keep the cage in place, we simply bring our hand all the way to the top and now we start unscrewing. Now, the secret is to not unscrew the top, unscrew the bottle. If you do it very, very gently, you'll be able to gauge the pressure of the cork and very quietly open your champagne. 20 sommeliers are stationed across the ship's 12 dining venues. I always tell people, you don't go to an ice cream shop and you tell them, can I get, oh, sorry, I don't know much about ice cream, but can I take that one? You never say that, but when you come to a restaurant and you speak with a sommelier, you say that, you say, oh, can I get this? I don't know much about wine. We have this culture built around wine where we make people believe that they need to study wine before they get to enjoy it. Feel free to explore. If you like steak and white wine, by all means, go for it. Feeding 1,200 luxury guests at sea is no small task. Behind it are two men who share the same vision. We are working together for the past 20 years. We understand each other and we don't have to argue or to question too many things. Even though we are arguing, definitely, because sometimes... Really? We don't agree on the same thing, but we always find the right solution. We are about 25,000 kilometers between, so I live in Florida, he lives in France. I don't want to talk to him, I just don't use the phone. We have 699 different preparations available every day on board the ship. I would say it's 99% of our preparations are made on board. Anything else that we are offering in every single restaurant on board is exactly run with the same philosophy. Connection to food goes all the way back to Chef Eric's roots. My grandmother has played a big role in my career. My grandmother was cooking all day long for the family. And I used to be around her all the time from morning to night, and I got to interact with what she was doing, the way she was doing it, etc. And this is where I started to become a little bit, you know, interested by cooking. The same is true for Chef Alexis, who recalls as a boy in his grandmother's kitchen making her chocolate mousse. It's more than a recipe. This is my shield that brings me memories and connecting as well from the past to where we are today in my professional career. When I was a kid, actually, I was making this chocolate mousse for my grandmother. That was the time where I got the first connection with cooking. Today, that same mousse is served on board the Oceania Vista, a simple French classic.