It was only fitting that Scenic’s first ocean cruise ship caused an unequivocal stir in the ultra-luxury cruise industry. Scenic Eclipse launched with a revolutionary proposition: the World’s First Discovery Yacht complete with two on-board helicopters and a submarine-like that used to film ‘Great Barrier Reef with David Attenborough’. This is ocean cruising like never before; an ultra-luxury cruise ship completely dedicated to adventure and exploration.
Scenic offers unforgettable experiences in-port, and the on-board experience is no less memorable. With almost everything included in the price of your luxury cruise, you can enjoy up to ten elegant on-board dining options, and premium spirits all day every day.
To bring the dining on-board to life and showcase the cruise line’s culinary innovations at sea, SixStarCruises hosted an exclusive event with Scenic alongside a presentation from VP Oceans Hotel Operations, Chef Tom Goetter at Great Fosters in Surrey. During the event, Tom shared how Scenic brings different culinary delights to the fore for every meal and the experience which you can expect to enjoy on-board.
How did you start working with Scenic?
Before I worked with Scenic, I was working with another luxury cruise company, but I had decided to end my career in ocean cruising. I felt it didn’t really match my free spirit. But when I got the call from Scenic, they explained there would be multiple restaurants, they were developing exciting new concepts and I could have a lot of freedom. I flew to Cologne to cook a few dishes for the owners, they liked what I did and now it’s been five years.
Scenic has broken away from tradition and has no speciality dining venues on-board, can you tell us a bit more about this?
I hated to have special dining venues, what does that mean? That the other ones don’t deserve attention, that there’s nothing special about it? So, I said to our owner, ‘We cannot make a special restaurant, we want every single restaurant to be unique and special.’ We don’t want you to be at the end of your cruise or middle of the cruise, fighting for reservations for one of the restaurants because you feel it’s better than the others. We want you to have a good dining experience, every single night.
We are not just a cruise ship that has no main dining room, or only a couple of restaurants. What does this mean for guests? We have fresh food in every single restaurant, you sit down, you place an order, we start cooking. And you might think ‘Oh this is beautiful’ but it’s even better for the chefs because it immediately means we can cook fresh for you, every single time of the day.
Waste is a challenge that chefs are constantly tackling, how does this take on dining impact that?
Cruise lines waste around 200-250kg of micro-herbs when they fly these to their ocean vessels, so what we find right now is that we are the only ocean vessel(s) in the world that grow their own herbs, and we grow 32 different types of herbs onboard. How do we do this? We produce our own fresh water, there are several companies that can grow herbs without soil, which means we’re not just using better flavoured herbs onboard, but we’re also being more environmentally friendly, and we don’t waste any soil So, we’re not just trying to serve good food, but we also have an environmental standpoint which I’m very serious about. We would rather not serve lobster, or beef tenderloin en masse on-board, we would rather introduce to our guests a new approach to food.
We have the beautiful Yacht Club, which is our only buffet restaurant on-board. Buffets aren’t environmentally friendly because when you plate up a buffet for guests, at least two-thirds goes in the bin, so we try to reduce our buffets as much as we can. So, when you go into Yacht Club, you’ll see it’s a miniature dessert buffet, what that means is everything you see will be a miniature version of the dessert, it requires 50%-80% more work, but it is worth it. Why is that? Because we don’t waste almost any food at all, we’re trying to cook all the hot courses a la minute and basically portion up 5 to 10 portions at a time, so instead of finding a huge buffet in quantity, what you’ll find is a huge variety of dishes but in very small portions and that makes it quite unique, I think.
We have one buffet for lunch and for breakfast of course, but we cook as much as possible a la carte.
What are some of the dining highlights from the other restaurants on-board?
We have the Night Market; currently, we’re the only ship in the world that serves street food in a six-star cruise ocean vessel. I’m a strong believer that street food is the core of food around the world, so, we take you on a street food market tour around the world, from India to Asia, to the Middle East and to the Philippines.
We have the Elements, which is an Italian international restaurant. I say that because we would rather focus on the flair of eating Italian food, rather than entirely serving only Italian food. What does that mean? Well, when you go to a restaurant in Italy it’s loud, it’s sharing concepts, the table is full of colours and different food. This is what we try to approach, rather than having traditional Italian food, so we have a bit of Italian food, but it is quite international.
The Koko’s fusion restaurant always incorporates two or three countries every evening. It’s always Asian kind of cuisines, such as the Middle East, Malaysia, and India. We always try to incorporate three types of cuisine each night. It’s a la carte, the portions are very small, and the idea here is to literally order the entire menu in a perfect world, put it on the table and share with friends.
Then we have the Lumiere, a French restaurant where I bent as many rules as possible Where you can enjoy candy floss with caviar. Every single dish will remind you of French cuisine, but it won’t visualise as French cuisine and that’s the idea. We’ve tried to remove almost all of the butter part of French cuisine because we know it’s very heavy, so you can actually have 8 courses without rolling back to your cabin.
What other culinary delights can guests expect to enjoy on-board?
We have the room service, of course, and the Epicure, which will be on Eclipse II with the chef’s garden, which is the room where all the micro-herbs are grown. Again, I wanted to make a difference here, so I’m not going to be a cruise chef who serves you a risotto class or a pasta class, like all the others I did in the past. We wanted to take it very seriously and make it sustainable, so we teach you what to do with unripe tomatoes, for example. We teach you what to do with old cucumbers in your fridge, we want to be as close to possible to guests and their struggles. So, when you have a garden, everyone knows this, there’s this one seasonal fruit or vegetable which are not ripe yet, which you usually take and put in the fridge or kitchen counter for two weeks and you believe it becomes ripe in that time, which really isn’t true. So, this is what we focus on in our classes. We make our own yoghurts, we make our own meats, we teach you how to make marinades which makes things sustainable. We pickle with you and all those sorts of things. The guests love it! We match the cuisine with the itineraries, so for example, when we’re in South America with you, you can make your own chocolate from chocolate beans, which isn’t actually all that complicated and it’s always great to see how the guests react to it.
That’s it, it’s all very simple, there are only 10 dining options and 38 chefs.
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