Every week, over 6,600 people vacation aboard the world’s largest cruise ship. And all those people need to eat three, four, eight times a day. You have to calculate that it’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus snacks, plus a night, plus all 24-hour food all around. And that never stops. Ship kitchens run 24-7, manned by a culinary team of more than a thousand people. They dish out over 30,000 meals every single day. And they do it all from compact kitchens on a rocking ship. So how does all this food make it to the plate?
We’ll start on the loading dock on a Saturday. This is turnaround day, when all new food is delivered to Deck 2. This is basically a place that you would not like to be on on turnaround day when we are loading. It’s busy, busy, super busy. That’s Jaret. He orders food for the ship’s 23 different restaurants. Every week, Jaret’s got a $1 million shopping budget. All of that is just for seven days of food. Sometimes Jaret will tweak his orders based on who’s coming aboard. More kids means more chicken fingers.
That’s how the operation runs. So we monitor it on a daily basis, what has been used, what has not been used, and then we adjust our orders accordingly. But by and large, being in Miami, having the same number of people, it’s almost the same every cruise. On turnaround day, 30 trucks arrive at Miami port. They’re carrying 500 pallets worth of inventory, and all that has to be loaded onto the ship by 4 p.m. Any delay in our operation can hamper the sail away of the ship, which is again a big logistic requirement.
Over 600,000 pounds of food and drinks are provisioned for just one week of sailing. Once on board, everything is moved along the ship’s secret highway. This is I-95, and it runs the entire length of the ship, on deck two. We separate all the stores to the different locations that they are supposed to go. We have about 20 different storerooms divided into freezers, fridges, walk-in fridges, and rice stores. Seafood, meat, vegetables, and fruit are all divided and stored in separate fridges.
If you come towards the end of the cruise, this box will be almost empty with a few fruits that are needed for two more days, which we keep as backup stock. There are also six freezers. That’s where the 700 pounds of ice cream that’ll be eaten each week are stored. Dry goods are stored down on deck one. Full of spices, full of chocolate in this store room. Coffee, it’s nice to be in this store room.
An elevator gets the food downstairs. Jared’s team checks all of the food for quality control every day. If produce is ripening faster than expected, they try to work it into another meal. For example, overripe broccoli could go into broccoli cheddar soup instead of being tossed. Once inventory is stored, restaurants on upper decks put in food orders with Jarrett. Chefs will come downstairs, pick up their order, and cart it away to be cooked. That’s where this guy comes in. Any food on board this beautiful ship,
anything you eat, it’s my responsibility. Whatever you have beautiful potato fry, it’s mine. Rice is mine. Pate is mine. Pastry is mine. Salad, shrimp, whatever you eat, it’s my responsibility. Rijo’s team of 280 chefs run the kitchens 24-7. Each chef works 10 to 12-hour days. Contracts typically last four months without a single day off.
Some of the people start to work for 8 o’clock in the morning, all the way to 2 o’clock, take a break, come back again 5 o’clock, feeding by 9.30. Then other group will start to work at 10 o’clock in the night, all the way to 10 o’clock in the morning. So we cover day and night productions. Chefs on board cook up nearly 100 different menus every week. All the menus are developed at Royal Caribbean’s Miami headquarters.
And every week, chefs stick to the same rotation of menus, cooking up everything from racks of lamb to hand-rolled sushi. The food has to be diverse to match Symphony of the Sea’s international passengers, vacationing at all kinds of price points. We try to please everybody, and to make sure everybody finds what they’re looking for.
All the cooking happens in 36 kitchens, or galleys as they’re called on the ship. There are 12 specialty restaurants on board, costing up to $50 a person, and each of those restaurants has its own small galley. In those tight quarters, chefs crank out the same menu every day. At Jamie’s Italian, it’s fresh pasta. At Hooked, it’s over 2,000 oysters shuffled per cruise. But the largest amount of food is reserved for the main dining room, which spans three decks and serves up to 6,000 people a night. Eating here is included in your ticket. Before food heads up to the main galleys, it starts in one of the prep kitchens, off I-95. There’s a butcher shop.
The butcher goes through about 15,000 pounds of beef and 9,700 pounds of chicken each week. There’s also a veggie cutting room and a fish thawing box. Lobster is the most popular dish in main dining. The ship goes through about 2,100 pounds of lobster tails every week. Finally, the food heads upstairs to the main galley. The ship’s biggest kitchen is broken down by categories, desserts, bread, cold food, and hot food. In dessert, chefs whip up cakes, chocolates, and a hundred different types of pastries. Over in the bread bakery, they make 40 different kinds of bread from all over the world, all from scratch. But the real hustle comes just before the dinner rush. 6,000 hungry passengers in the main dining room. Remember Rico? Before dinner prep starts, he has to approve all the dishes.
Ayoli, we need to put a little bit more for today. You can see, Chef, how you’re doing. Take a note, don’t forget. That’s what we’re talking about, right? Beautiful, beautiful. You know how many times we’ve already cooked? Great. Chef, thank you so much. Thank you so much. I look forward to a beautiful night tonight.
Chefs take his notes and get cooking. Chefs can see a tally of each dish ordered up on screens. The system also keeps track of how much inventory is used. In the cold room, salads and appetizers like carpaccio come together. In the hot room, chefs dish out soups, sauces, sides, and mains. We have two kinds of chefs. Chefs working here on the line, which is close to me, plating up, and chefs on the stove, cooking. So everything we do is batch cooking. So basically, we grill a steak there, we pass it over to the pass, the person on the pass is plating it up to the requested temperature. That means always that the guests are getting fresh food, and from an operational point, we don’t have any overproduction.
Finally, waiters deliver those dishes to hungry passengers out in main dining. Between the chefs, inventory crew, waiters, and dishwashers, it takes a team of 1,085 people to keep this massive operation going. Together, they cook nearly 11 million meals each year, and they’re doing it all on a moving ship. The ship is rocking. Then all the equipment is built to the ship rocket. Then in whatever moment, maybe the ship move, somebody don’t put one brake in one trolley, and you see the trolley flying away and happen. That’s why all the cooks always be the attention with that. But if crew members are doing their job right, passengers won’t even know any of it’s happening. passengers won’t even know any of it’s happening. They’ll just get back to eating their eighth meal of the day.
