A couple of days ago we set sail from Miami and are heading towards the Caribbean. After brief stops in Puerto Rico and St Martin’s Island for no more than a day, we will turn back. Seven days in all. A full five of them take place on the high seas. These are the days when the ship entertains guests as best it can with all it has. And the highlight of the programme, of course, is the food. And the main man is the chef, whom I try to catch in the pool. The first course was cooked on the Celebrity Silhouette five years ago. Built in a year and a half in Germany, at fourteen stories high, it is one of the five largest in the world and can accommodate two and a half thousand guests and the same number of crew members (that is, there is one employee on the ship for each guest). Planning began long before that, in the late 90s, and the details give a slightly outdated idea of luxury: the floating atrium with grand chandeliers and burgundy carpets is not far removed from the Titanic aesthetic. The food, on the other hand, is timeless and is constantly being updated to reflect the spirit of the times. Soon, it is said, even pop-up restaurants will start to operate on the ship. Currently there are eleven dining outlets on board. Not counting the area on the upper deck where hot dogs and burgers are served in unlimited quantities (you get burned waiting in line) and the ice-cream machines. And also those establishments for VIP-guests which I have seen only through a keyhole (sitting businessmen with cigars). The pride of the Food Department is the conceptual restaurants. There are five in total and they are all located on deck five. Tuscan Grille is an Italian steakhouse in a room dominated by red and wooden surfaces. Blu with cool abstract patterns and a healthy menu (steak will come, but with vinaigrette sauce instead of béarnaise). Bistro on Five, with an open kitchen that makes crepe suzette pancakes. Qsine, whose menu is loaded onto the iPad, features cuisines from around the world, packaged in mini-sets for company. And Murano, which they call “our Michelin restaurant” because Michelin once let it slip that they would be happy to give Murano stars, but they can’t: the rules say a restaurant must have a physical address. Once in the kitchen of Murano I even caught the students of a cooking school, which is opened for the duration of the cruise. On the whole, restaurants like these would look harmonious even five minutes from the Kremlin. But more often and most of all there are two places to eat on a ship. The first is the Ocean View buffet for breakfast and lunch. There is not one “line” with food, as it happens in canteens, but eight “islands”: simple and hearty dishes like pastas and ragouts, various meat cuts, what are called, dozens of kinds of bread, fresh fruit and vegetables – in general, no special trimmings. Everything is delicious, and it’s impossible to taste everything even in seven days of travel. Second place goes to the two-storey Grand Cuvee restaurant for 1,700 people, the core of which is a transparent structure with three thousand bottles of different wines inside (on board, by the way, there are twenty sommeliers and several bars, including a bar with molecular cuisine). The interior designer describes it as follows: “I wanted the place to be like a champagne glass. Indeed, the evening dinners here are always extremely festive. The menu is divided into two parts: on the left are the classics (i.e. French cuisine) and on the right the experimental dishes, which change every day. The dress code requirements also change every day. For those who don’t accept the rules of the game, there is always a pair of jackets at the entrance to the restaurant – one of which was constantly thrown over the shoulders of my colleague, photographer Gleb Leonov, who preferred denim overalls to suits. The other part of the Grand Cuvée game is that you become jealous of your waiter at other tables. One waiter is assigned to each group of guests – ours was Okayashi from Bali. Night after night he gets to know your tastes better and better so you get more and more recommendations; he tells you jokes and stories about how they don’t eat raw food in Bali and how he was a rock musician on land with a whitewashed Mohawk but has to wear a bow tie and a jacket. He gradually becomes the only friend on the ship, a person you look forward to meeting just as much as you look forward to meeting the claimed lobster. Suddenly, one evening you notice that he lingers at another table longer than he should and, bringing an Alaska dessert, jokes with an elderly lady the same way he joked with you yesterday: “Your burger, ma’am”. He does his job well. A couple of days later we show up at the main galley. Chef Carlos greets us; he comes out very chipper, greeting us with an accent, from his office, which is located in the middle of the galley and looks like a freight lift with a window. Inside is a computer and even a secretary, both helping him deal with the complicated logistics. Carlos isn’t even the chef, but the soul, the face, the brains and the sense of humour of the kitchen. He takes us through the main galley, which is part of the Grand Cuvée restaurant and occupies two floors, so the chefs occasionally have to navigate their way through the work in a lift. Outside, it looks like the kitchen of an average restaurant: metal surfaces, cold light, smoke, steam. There is probably less shouting because it doesn’t have time to reach the opposite side of the kitchen. This is the most obvious difference – in scale. The main galley is a system of such typical kitchens, except that each shop here is the size of an entire kitchen. The equipment is special, all “safety features”: no gas, only electricity; sealed and tight doors everywhere, sometimes even locks; soup kettles have feet bolted to the floor and metal lids. Everything is made especially for ship’s galleys, and so is the ship, in Germany – with rocking in mind: nothing should tip over or spill. A special manager trains new cooks how to use all this equipment. Special safety rules during work with a knife are also connected with the rocking on the ship: the legs must be placed shoulder height apart, hands always wear metal gloves, like those used for work with the slicer in common kitchens. We pass by the enormous pots, the serving tables with hundreds of dishes, the piles of dough the size of a pillow and the wall full of technical charts. They all go something like this: “Add ten kilos of this and that.” As we flow from workshop to workshop, one of the cooks shouts at me, “Are you working here already?!” It’s the blue kerchief I’ve frivolously tied around my neck. In the liner’s galley, such handkerchiefs are not just an accessory – they help to determine the level of the cook. The system is similar to belts in judo – in ascending order: yellow, red, green, navy blue and black. The highest degree is not to wear a scarf at all, like Carlos, because everyone knows who’s in charge. And he is the most important: in charge of all the food on the ship. Four sous-chefs report to Carlos: he is responsible for the Ocean View buffet, for the concept restaurants on deck five, for the Grand Cuvée itself and another for the bread. In turn, they each have another sous chef on site to assist. “We have a total of 1,060 chefs,” says Carlos. – We often transfer them from restaurant to restaurant to learn and gain experience in different kitchens. We have our own bakery, which makes bread for the whole ship while everyone else is asleep and has a staff of 10 people. There are also “travelling chefs” who go from one company ship to another and come up with something new. The entire staff, including the cooks, is currently represented by seventy nationalities. Guests are an average of twenty-five. Most of the cooks are Filipinos, Indonesians and Indians. More and more people are coming from Eastern Europe. The higher your position in the galley, the shorter the contract: the bosses work for four months, then they go on leave for two months. Others have a working period of six to eight months and only two holidays. Can you imagine if the guests get bored with the food on the ship by the end of the cruise, what happens to the crew?” For the crew, the ship has its own restaurant. It is divided into three different areas with three different concepts: fast food, healthy eating and international cuisine. “The captain of the ship, for example, is Greek, and he sometimes wants baklava, Greek salad or roast lamb – that’s where we offer him. He doesn’t have a separate menu, he’s a simple guy, he’s cool, he eats with everybody. But he’s got a joystick, which isn’t quite the steering wheel you might think it is, but it costs a fortune! – Carlos emotionally mumbles something else in Spanish, throwing his hands up in the air and we say goodbye until the next meeting. We leave the storeroom for last: after that there will be nothing left to ask, for it is the holy of holies of the food department, and indeed the entire ship. We spend the next few days drifting from the pool where Carlos used to play to the gym on the bow of the liner, from there to the canteen or restaurant, then to the sun lounger – a pattern that we repeat over and over again until it’s time to go to bed. One day is different from another only because of Ilya, the bartender from Russia who works on the ship. We met on the first day, and ever since then he has been showing us amazing tricks with juggling glasses and trick pours of rare Caribbean spirits. But we meet him every time at a different bar. The thing is, the bartenders on the ship can work in any establishment. Unlike cooks, they do not need to memorize new recipes, the cocktail list is approximately the same everywhere. So you find Vasya in elegant blazer at Passport Bar or in Hawaiian shirt on the upper deck. And he’s equally good everywhere. And then there’s the vault. It takes up half the deck and is crossed by a corridor here called I-95, in association with the interstate highway in the US, the longest in the country and running through 15 states from north to south. Local I-95 runs through twenty-one freezers, the condition of which is monitored by a separate team. Each freezer has its own purpose: for fish, for meat, for fruit and vegetables, even a special fridge for bananas and potatoes, which are kept together because they need the same but different temperature from other fruit and vegetables. “We follow Murphy’s Law here – anything that can break will break, and so everything has a back-up, even the storage unit. And the back-up has another back-up.” I don’t believe Carlos’ words. How? It’s only possible if there’s another similarly sized submarine attached to the ship. But Carlos doesn’t reveal all the cards and changes the subject. “For the Caribbean voyage we only shop in America. In the summer we sail to Europe and sometimes buy seasonal fruit, olive oil and burrata from Italian farmers we are friends with. And when we sail to Alaska, of course, we don’t miss the chance to load up on local crab. There are thirty kosher meals on the ship as well. For obvious reasons we can’t cook it in the galley, so we buy it packaged on dry land and provide it for those who ask for it during the voyage. But meat and fish, no matter where the liner sails from or where it goes, are still brought in containers to the port of departure from America – because of the high American sanitary standards. From deep freezing the meat comes off at low temperatures in our freezer and sometimes it doesn’t defrost until the next cruise. We have tried other systems, faster, but this is the only way the meat stays soft,” says Carlos. Another sanitary requirement is that all food that has been on the ‘line’ for more than four hours is thrown away, but in a smart way. Special equipment turns all the organics into something like a large mash. This mash is handled further, depending on the situation and the needs of the ship. Sometimes it’s thrown into the water, sometimes, if it’s in port, it’s given to farmers for fertilizer, and sometimes it’s burned and recycled. Sometimes burned and converted into the kind of energy our ship sails on, and with it sails 1,500 tons of frozen beef, six million fresh chicken eggs, three million bottles of milk. And a host of experiences.
The chef passes to the captain of the ship, the captain throws the ball over the net, touch, the ball goes to the hostess, the hostess is dressed as a mermaid so she bounces the ball with her tail, the ball hits the water, splashes in all directions and lands on my recorder microphone. It seems that the chef of this ship is going to be difficult to interview.
Carlos Miguel Fernandez comes from a town where there are fewer people than on this whole liner. He now plays striker in water polo. The tournament is held in the pool on the upper deck once a cruise – for the entertainment of the crew and holidaymakers. Carlos even has a special water jacket for this purpose. And he changes his tunic twice a day, as we shall see later. I can immediately imagine his wardrobe – a hundred white tunics in a row. That may well be the case, for it is not like a normal kitchen; and it is not even called a kitchen but a galley.
Before landing at Princess Juliana Airport, planes fly so low over the beach that tourists and spotters from all over the world gather on St Martin’s Island for this performance.
The port of the world’s smallest inhabited island, St Martin, still shared between France and Holland.
Refrigeration room where the meat is slowly pulled away from the deep freeze before reaching the galley.
There are other places that are simpler in appearance, but no less interesting. The Lawn Club Grill, on the top deck, has a live lawn and grill where you can cook your own barbecue, for example, or with the chef’s help. And the tiny three-table cafe next to the gym, where many people go afterwards: the food here is therefore healthy, gluten-free and just plain nice – porridges with berries, fruit, smoothies.
The central galley has its own sink for the various products. Several times a day, the ship’s chef, Carlos Miguel Fernandez, goes around the upper deck to talk to guests and find out how they want their lobsters on the menu tomorrow.
The most popular place on the liner after the restaurants is the outdoor pool deck.
The colour of the scarf around a ship’s cook’s neck is a marker of his level of professionalism; green means average.
By analogy with the famous highway, this corridor on the liner is called the I-95 route – it runs through all the refrigerated food chambers.
Once a cruise, hostesses dress up as mermaids and entertain guests by the pool all day; sympathisers sometimes feed the mermaids.
Before leaving the galley, I notice that an entire room has been given over to dishwashers – and what a ones! They’re called washing tunnels, and they look like stretched-out airport luggage checking terminals. One is for dishes and the other for cutlery. Washing is done in two steps and takes just four minutes. Incidentally, although the dishes on the liner are sturdier than those usually found in restaurants, 5% of everything on the ship is broken every day.
The sous-chefs have just worked off the cruise and are resting before starting the next one, watching the loading of the new products from above.
The living lawn and veranda on the upper deck is the Lawn Club Grill Cafe; you can cook your own barbecue here and sometimes there are concerts on the grounds.
The Murano restaurant offers classic Italian and French dishes.
For holidaymakers on the liner, every stop in port is an opportunity to explore the local attractions and shops, but the kitchen keeps the work going: the chefs transfer waste to port, stock up on drinking water and prepare for the return of guests.
