The prospect of catering for a party of 100 would probably send most Gauteng restaurateurs into a mild panic. Imagine then the planning required to cater, all day, for more than 1 000 ultra-discerning guests - in the middle of the ocean with no supermarket around the corner.
On my recent Mediterranean cruise on one of the world's top cruise ships, Crystal Serenity, a most informative conducted tour of the ship's galley (read "kitchen", landlubbers) revealed the pressures under which the staff works. The galley, situated next to the ship's main dining room, is a sprawling stainless steel facility, so glistening and clean you almost want to reach for your sunglasses. From it, the Crystal Serenity's own extensive dining areas - as well as the two world-renowned speciality restaurants on board, Nobu Matsuhisa's Silk Road, and the Valentino group's Prego - operate. There's non-stop, around the clock action in the galley every day.
The night cleaners finish around 5am, just as the breakfast team of 10 chefs, cooks, and assistant cooks (chefs, by the way, are heads of kitchen teams; cooks well they cook) arrive to start their day. The ovens are then heated, and the griddles and grills warmed up.
Next the daily menus are reviewed, food brought up from the storage areas on the deck below, and inspected for freshness. The air is filled with the wonderful aroma of brewed coffee, freshly-baked pastries and breads - but for the staff there's no time to savour smells. The rush to feed the thousand guests their first meal of the day must be completed in under two hours. By 7.30am, it is already time to start preparing roasts and begin the preparations for lunch and dinner.
While waiters remain at their stations to attend the guests in the Crystal Dining Room, 30 assistant waiters line up with guests' requests, and the galley comes alive with cooks working to fill the orders. China plates and silver trays are speedily loaded (under the watchful eye of Executive Chef), covered with silver tops and rushed to the tables - mouth-watering selections such as oven-baked lobster strudel, porcini-dusted fillet of snapper, and peppercorn-seared ahi tuna carpaccio, all forever embedded in my taste buds.
On a typical 10-day cruise, Crystal Serenity's shopping list includes over 60 tons of foodstuffs to be purchased and delivered to the ship's dock in the few hours available on a "turnaround day", when one cruise ends and the next one begins the following day.
Once on board, the food is rushed to temperature controlled storage areas. The meat is frozen, but all of Crystal Serenity's fish is fresh with much of it arriving on the morning of the day it is served for lunch or dinner.
One of the highlights of one of the days at sea during our Mediterranean cruise was a gala lunch buffet, a bewildering display of food skillfully sculpted into ice, pastry - even watermelon - carvings and sculptures, with confectionery of all shapes and sizes arranged into colourful works of art.
The mind-boggling showcase filled the entire reception piazza, and attracted hundreds of guests. In fact, it needed some elbow-power to get my camera in position to record the spectacle. The creative team in the galley was then introduced by the executive chef, Franz Weiss, and did a "lap of honour" to lengthy, deserved applause. It was good to see South Africans among the top chefs on board.
The appreciative guests - by then just about drooling - immediately devoured the beautiful cascading fountains of prawns; the spectacular pastries with their magnificent shapes, curlicues and swirls; the colourful kaleidoscope of confectionery; and the eggs dressed up as penguins. Now you saw it, now you didn't. I felt a bit guilty to let such culinary art unceremoniously glide down my throat. Oh, well, the chefs are probably used to it.
Later on in the cruise, the showpiece of the Mozart high tea was a bust of Wolfgang himself, created in the galley from chocolate. Perhaps out of respect for the great composer, we did not eat it.
The volumes of food passing through the galley is amazing: 2 500 bread rolls and 90 loaves of sandwich bread are baked daily; with 90kg of salads, 50kg of shrimps, 900kg of fruit, 220kg of beef, 385kg of poultry, 180kg of fish, 450 litres of coffee, and 2 300 eggs prepared at sea daily.
So, when it's all served and done, who cleans the plates, glasses and silverware? The galley has an enormous dishwashing area staffed by 10 staff members who work non-stop to pre-wash, sort, load and feed china, glasses, and silver into enormous dishwashing machines that definitely wouldn't fit into any suburban kitchen. In the scullery, another four staffers scrub and polish the specially-produced oversized pots, saute and braising pans, and skillets. And the silver is polished every day in a separate area. Of all the jobs available on Crystal Serenity, I should imagine the queue of applicants for the dishwashing section must be the shortest.
The galley tour showed that for Crystal Serenity kitchen staff, it's a hectic life with precious little serenity around in their workplace. And, remember, apart from catering for over a thousand guests daily, the galley also has to feed the ship's crew of 655. One wonders what such pressure would do to Gordon Ramsey's vocabulary.
- For more information of Crystal Serenity cruises, visit the website www.crystalcruises.com or call the offices of Cruises International on 011-327-0327.
- Jan de Beer was a guest of Crystal Cruises.