Cooking for a Crowd

Can you imagine being in charge of 12,000 servings of food a day? Of supervising 80 chefs and 40 clean-up people? That’s the job of Andrew Cartwright, the Executive Chef on our cruiseship.

I have been most intrigued with the food on this cruise. It’s plentiful, varied, and of extremely high quality. I wondered just how they managed to consistently pull this off. So I wrote a letter to Mr. Cartwright asking for a tour of the kitchen. We were somewhat surprised when he personally called and arranged a time to brief us.

Multiple industrial-size coffee urns supply the ship’s needs.

They talk about recipes in multiples of 100. The cooking containers for each of the day’s 5 soups have about the same volume as a bathtub.


Polenta is turned out of the pan cut into hundreds of pieces.

The desserts are plated to match these pictures.

The wine cellar, which is about the size of a garage, is kept locked. Our half bottle of wine from last night’s dinner sits in there somewhere with our name on it and will miraculously appear at our table tonight.

As we finished our tour at 5:00, staff were already getting the dining room ready for the first seating of 700 at 6:30, followed by a seating of 1100 at 9:00.

Mr. Cartwright appeared calm and collected, but he let us know this is just the calm before the storm.

I now know that steak and shrimp cocktail are on the menu for tonight, but the remaining choices will wait for 6:30.

Tomorrow we leave our floating home to hop on a train and head south to the Amalfi Coast, where we will live in a rental house in Praiano for the last 2 weeks of the trip. I’m rather looking forward to staying put for a while.