Food & beverage
As many cruisers stay on a Celebrity ship for more than a week, the company decided that they wanted a few different options. “On most ships, guests can see a different show on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and have three totally different experiences,” Bickel says. But when Le Grand Bistro (on the newer ships) and Qsine (on the older ones) is not showing Le Petit Chef, you would not know. The projectors are hidden in the ceilings and it is only in the evening that the venues become TableMation theatres.
Above: Cruise companies provide an array of foods, from favourites like pork belly to vegetarian and vegan dishes.
Opening page: Award- winning chef Jennifer Jasinski demonstrates the art of cooking for passengers aboard a Windstar Cruise ship.
brand’s newer shows, Le Petit Chef and Family, went viral on TikTok after being shared by a guest. In this particular show, the cooking process takes place over the four seasons and tugs on diner’s heartstrings. “Over those four seasons, we follow Le Petit Chef in his life. He starts out as a young child meeting his wife, and as the seasons change, they grow older, they have a family, have grandchildren, then at the end there’s a family reunion. It’s very emotional and people are sitting there crying,” says Michael Bickel, president and CEO of TableMation Studios, which works with artists at artistic collective Skullmapping to create 3D-animated dining experiences for restaurants on shore and at sea.
“People want to go out and have an experience. They don’t want to go out and have a steak. They’ve done that a thousand times.”
Michael Bickel
For Bickel, the beauty of the experience is that it is communal. “Everyone’s laughing at the same time, everyone’s ‘aah’-ing at the same time. They’re elbowing the person next to them who they don’t know and talking to them. The world is a crazy place now and everybody’s on one side of an opinion [or] another side of an opinion, but here, everybody’s having a good time, everyone’s doing it together and to me, that’s what adds to the magic of what we do,” he says.
Building special moments The process of creating such a unique dining environment at sea is an involved one. It starts with a meeting between TableMation, Skullmapping and Celebrity’s F&B team, led by Michelin-starred chef Cornelius Gallagher, who is consulted on both the script and the menu. Then follows a painstaking design process with 24 hours dedicated to every five seconds of the animation. “As Skullmapping develops the show, Cornelius Gallagher and his staff create dishes and send videos to us of how the dishes are made. The animators match that. It takes about a year from start to finish to create one show,” Bickel explains.
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From the unreal to the real Of course, technology is not the only way to create an immersive culinary experience at sea. At boutique cruise line Windstar Cruises, which operates a fleet of small luxury cruise ships carrying up to 312 passengers and has always focused heavily on the F&B experience, guests find themselves immersed in a culinary landscape not just on board, but when they leave the ships too. “It’s a bit counterintuitive, but it’s not just our job to feed guests on board but also know the best places to eat off our yachts,” says Windstar president Christopher Prelog. “It’s part of our DNA as a small cruise company that’s focused on bringing our guests closer to the world. So much of travel is about food.” On top of its culinary offerings on board,
Windstar provides shore excursions that go far beyond the typical bus tour and lunch experience. “We like to have a mix of wine, brewery and distillery tours, as well as hands-on cooking classes, plus really once-in-a-lifetime culinary moments, like dining in a tree pod served by waiters on zipline, or a helicopter journey to a Michelin-starred restaurant in a chateau,” Prelog explains.
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After testing the show on one ship in 2018, it was only six weeks before it became the top-rated restaurant on the ship. Celebrity immediately put in an order for the show for two more ships, then six. Le Petit Chef now entertains guests on 13 vessels, with a new show set to launch on the Celebrity Beyond, which sets sail in April 2022. “It’s called How to become the world’s greatest celebrity chef. It’s an amazing experience,” Bickel enthuses. “If it goes well, the guests will graduate and become great chefs.” He believes demand for experiences like this, both at sea and on land, is only going to grow. “People want to go out and have an experience. They don’t want to go out and have a steak. They’ve done that a thousand times,” he says. “Le Petit Chef is an immersive experience where you walk in and the whole room glows, the whole table comes to life.” For Celebrity, its shareability certainly does not hurt. “When you look at the videos of people dining, half of them – unfortunately to some degree – are watching through their phones. They want to share this amazing experience and put it on their TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, all their social media platforms because it’s unique and that’s what people are looking for,” Bickel says.
Windstar Cruises
Windstar Cruises
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