The Biggest Challenge Geoffrey Zakarian Faced When Creating Cruise Ship Menus

Whether your cruise has stops at food markets that inspire wanderlust or cities boasting of some of the world's oldest restaurants, you will still find yourself enjoying hospitality on the ship itself. Behind the specialty restaurants or open-access buffets, there is planning and preparation that make your meals so enjoyable, such as preparing the menus and the training staff.

Even with great minds like chef Geoffrey Zakarian's at work, there are still challenges to cruise ship dining. As a restaurant owner, Iron Chef, television co-host and producer, and so much more, chef Zakarian's reputation precedes him. One of Zakarian's accomplishments was his work crafting dining concepts for Norwegian Cruise Lines. In a conversation with us at the New York Wine and Food Fest, Zakarian shared insights on the unique challenges he faced when creating menus for cruise lines.

According to Zakarian, the biggest challenges when it came to cruise ship cuisine are the cycling of employees and pacing of ingredient usage. Despite these challenges, he said that there is a remarkably diligent team working to create a great dining experience for passengers. "It's really hard. But they were probably the best staff I ever had," he said of the people he worked with on a Norwegian Cruise Lines voyage.

Chef Geoffrey Zakarian shared that one of the benefits of working on a cruise line is that the same staff will work there each day. Once they are trained, they will be there for weeks and even months afterwards. "The only problem is," Zakarian explains, "in seven months, they all leave and another crew comes." The transition between staff members means starting the training process and routine over from the beginning with a new group of people.

The other challenge of providing cruise ship cuisine is gaining timely access to ingredients. Zakarian explains that the only chance to gather fresh ingredients happens when the cruise ship docks. Once the ingredients are taken aboard ship, they are frozen in smaller quantities in order to pace the food well between ports. "So, by Saturday at the end of the sail, your box is dry and you're in port Sunday getting new food. That was the challenge. It wasn't making menus," Zakarian said. Just like finding the perfect amount of salt to your pasta water, the key to a successful dining experience on a cruise ship is not using too much or too little of the ingredients.