Welcome to p
art five of my series, How to Survive at Sea: A Stage Crew’s Guide. Click here to see last week’s post, or click here to jump to the first in the series.
Where to Eat
Remember when you were in high school, and there was a constant push and pull of who was eating with whom and where? Well, on a cruise ship, the first question isn’t who you’re going to eat with, but whether you want to risk eating at all. When I first arrived onboard my roommate invited me out to eat a few times, on land. I scoffed: but why would you pay for food when the food here is free? “Oh,” she said, “give it three weeks.”
It only took two.
The food in Horizon Court (the passenger buffet where staff are allowed to eat) isn’t terrible, but it is exactly the same every week. Most cruises are either one week or two, so passengers don’t tend to notice that Tuesday is Italian Day, or Thursday is German Day. When you’re there for six months? You notice. You memorize. You despair. After a few weeks you’d be willing to spend money on land even if you weren’t making a metric ton of money – but you are.
(How much people are paid on cruise ships is a whole other kettle of fish. I was making twice as much as my Filipino colleagues for exactly the same job, because we were paid ‘according to the standards of our home country,’ despite the fact that everything we had to spend money on was in American funds. Other than basic necessities like toiletries and Doritos our expenses were $0, so we all had a lot of disposable income to flash around. Most of the crew were sending money home to their relatives; personally, I was saving up to pay off my student loans. So I set myself a very generous monthly budget of $300, which was enough for me to take tours, buy souvenirs and clothes, eat out when we were in port, AND drink in the crew bar (of course, a beer was $2 and a highball was $1…))
But there were times when we were at sea for long stretches, and often we were working around mealtimes and couldn’t get off the ship. So, sometimes we had to bite the bullet and eat the food onboard. This was especially challenging for me as a vegetarian (I was technically vegan when I embarked, but it had been a relatively new experiment and I knew going in that I wouldn’t be able to maintain it). So I had some navigating to do.
Like eating on land, certain restaurants are better than others. Horizon Court, where the passengers graze, can be counted on to maintain better standards than any of the ‘messes,’ but even then there are certain rules of thumb to be followed. Cruise ships cook everything in huge quantities, and they often cook things and then leave them in a pot for a long time, boiling/simmering away. So a general rule to live by is that the mushier it’s supposed to be, the better it will taste. Risotto? Even in the staff mess, it’s really tasty! Potatoes? Especially if they’re mashed, this is a good go to. Pasta? Ehhh, as long as you don’t want it al dente. Carrots, on the other hand? Corn on the cob? Just walk away. Spinach? It’s enough to make Popeye quit.
I was pretty happy with Horizon Court for daily nutritional needs, but staff are only allowed to eat there during “off-hours.” Usually that means no breakfast, lunch from 2pm-5pm, and dinner from 7pm to close. Occasionally, that means we show up around 8:30pm only to be told by a very hostile maitre’d that it’s busy tonight and we have to leave. The big problem with that, other than that we really didn’t want to eat in the staff mess, is that the staff mess was closed. Yup, they shut it down for cleaning from 8pm-9pm, which is exactly when our dinner break falls on a three-show night (almost every night was a three-show night). So sometimes dinner was leftover white rice that hadn’t been cleaned out of the crew mess yet, or munching on the illegal food that we stored in our cabins. Every staff cabin is outfitted with a mini-fridge, which I found strange considering that bringing food out of the mess was against the rules, and bringing fresh food onto the ship from outside was against the rules. Both would get you a written citation if you got caught, and both were completely ignored by supervisors and security with reckless aplomb. The only thing allowed in the cabin was theoretically food purchased in the canteen – things like Doritos and salsa, which seems like a generous reason to have a fridge in your cabin.
If you can’t eat in Horizon Court, the staff mess will be your second choice. They have a mix of Western, Filipino, and Indian food. It’s usually fresher than Horizon Court food, since they don’t have to prepare as much of it, but it’s also lower quality, and even more repetitive. While not on the dreaded seven-day repeating schedule, there are only four or five main courses you’ll seen with any regularity.
Finally, there’s the crew mess. This caters solely to an Indian and Filipino palate, and has TV screens scattered through. Noisy, metallic, and always smelling vaguely of disinfectant, the crew mess is the last option for the desperate – or, you know, the every day reality of all of the people working on the ship who are crew and not staff. A miserable hell hole, in other words. I may have eaten there three times in six months.
Being a multicultural space makes cooking fascinating, and you can observe how each restaurant caters to its clientele. The most obvious distinction is the spicing. A lot of Westerners (ie Americans) don’t like spice on their food, so Horizon Court solves this problem by mainly cooking without spices. Of any kind. They give it to you bland and simple, and then have basic steak spice and Tabasco sauce for the more enterprising guests. The crew mess, on the other hand, serves mostly Indian and Filipino crew members. So if you want to eat curry there, you’d better bring a bunch of bread, and cut it into two-thirds white rice.
On the other hand, this totally anonymous (despite the fact that I’ve told you the name of the restaurant) cruise line knows their dessert, and everywhere you go you’ll have fluffy sweet marvels. From pies to cakes to mousse miracles, it’s like they want the staff and crew to get as fat as their average passenger. But for some reason that no one understands, they make the world’s driest cupcakes and brownies. Avoid these at all costs, and if you need something simple, go for a cookie instead.
Sometimes you need a quick bite while all of the various messes and restaurants are closed, and if you don’t mind thin flavourless pizza, that’s the way to go! There’s only one pizza place that will serve staff, though, so you’ll have to journey up to the outdoor restaurant on the 14th floor for your fix. Unless, of course, you’d like to embark on a spy-like adventure with a passenger in an effort to get some pizza from the famous and closely guarded Alfredo’s.
Seriously, it was basically a spy movie.
So my mother’s friend – to protect her identity we’ll call her Flora (which is hilarious if you know her name is actually Nora) – happened to go on a cruise on the ship that I was working on. Over the course of one of our chats, I revealed that there was a pizza place on the ship called Alfredo’s where staff and crew are not allowed to eat. This pizza smelled amazing, and the few people who had managed to sneak a piece by being in with the chefs there said it was incredible. Flora offered to order me a pizza to her cabin, and I gratefully accepted. I invited a few friends to my cabin in anticipation, and we gleefully awaited the pizza.
Flora called the restaurant and ordered a pizza. She was told that, unfortunately, that pizza place did not deliver. She insisted, but as much as the passenger is always right, she could not get them to send it to her. So finally she went down to the restaurant in person, and asked for a pizza to go. She was told, regretfully, that they only served the pizza in the restaurant. So she ordered a pizza, sat down, and ate one slice. Then she asked for a doggy bag. Aha! Clever, don’t you think? Unfortunately, the elite pizza establishment was having none of it. No amount of arguing (and argue she did!) would convince them to put it in a bag for her – she had run up against the strange and bizarre cruise ship hierarchy. To this day, Alfredo’s pizza has gone untasted by me. But I did drunkenly order food at one of the passenger only restaurants at 2am and got away with it by hiding my name tag, so there’s that.
Eating on a cruise ship is part of the adventure. Sure, I gained about twenty pounds because all I ever ate were carbs; there were no ‘healthy’ options, and very few vegetarian options; and I ate more veggie meat smuggled onboard from Trader Joe’s than I care to admit. But I also ventured out to more restaurants on shore than I would have if the food was any good, and I got something better than good nutrition: great stories.
Next week, join us for part two: Who to Eat With (or: racism and its many insidious aspects)