Food & beverage
Left: Guests marvel at the popular immersive experience offered by Le Petit Chef.
Below: Aboard Celebrity Cruises, Le Petit Chef provides passengers with a culinary experience both delicious and visually dazzling.
Pandemic notwithstanding, guests are also invited along on market tours, where the chef walks them through the quality check process explaining what to look for in fresh fish, seafood and produce items. The market products purchased are then brought back to the ship and the chef creates a dish around it to feature on the dinner menu in the Amphora restaurant the same evening. Given the size of the Windstar yachts, the range of dining options is also impressive. On its star plus class yachts – their largest, with a capacity of just over 300 passengers – there are five different dining outlets, plus the grab and go Yacht Club Café and complimentary room service.
A powerful and personal experience It is Windstar’s themed cruises, created in partnership with the James Beard Foundation (JBF), a non-profit organisation that elevates and supports the people behind the US’s food culture, that go the extra mile. “We’ve partnered with the JBF for more than five years, and it started as a way for us to align ourselves and our values with a respected culinary organisation,” Prelog explains. “We wanted to enrich our culinary experiences, giving our guests unparalleled access to the most cutting edge and accomplished culinarians in the industry.” The current partnership works to include three themed cruises per year, hosted by a JBF-affiliated chef. These include chef demonstrations, which are typically on at-sea days, as well as a hosted four-course dinner one night of the cruise where the JBF chef adds four of their own dishes to Amphora restaurant’s nightly menu. Each of the themed cruise chefs also provides special recipes that are then featured on Windstar’s menus across the fleet and sailing regions.
World Cruise Industry Review /
www.worldcruiseindustryreview.com
Windstar Cruises’ 2022 line-up is an all-female trio, including Atlanta chef Jennifer Hill Booker, San Francisco’s Tanya Holland, and Boston’s Irene Li. All three are acclaimed chefs, cookbook authors, reality TV personalities, business owners, philanthropists and changemakers. “What is unique is that each one has a special connection to the places they are sailing, whether through food or family heritage, this creates powerful and inspiring personal experiences that our guests will never forget,” Prelog notes. It all feeds into the same idea Bickel comes back to when discussing the animated experience that is proving so popular on board Celebrity vessels. In order to set themselves apart, cruise operators are increasingly opting to create immersive experiences around food that passengers will not find anywhere else, on land or at sea. “Coming out of the pandemic, they want to go out and have an experience, they don’t just want a meal, and we are right there with that,” Bickel concludes. ●
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Celebrity Cruises
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