Chefs Show Skill, Creativity During Frequent Dining Extravaganzas

Day 88, 2025 Grand World Voyage

Tuesday, April 1, 2025; At Sea, Atlantic Ocean.

The idea of never having to create menus, prepare shopping lists, do the actual shopping, cook and clean up is one of the best features of nearly full-time cruising. Still, as anywhere, food cooked in the same kitchen by the same chefs begins to taste the same after a few months.

To shake things up, on some mornings I’m delaying breakfast an hour to go to the dining room and looking at dinner choices beyond my standard fish entrees.

But the most exciting deviation has been booking special dinners in the Pinnacle Grill. And this week brought two outstanding meals from Chef Tiffany and Executive Chef Neil.

Chef’s Club is a new and popular dining option, despite its $129 price tag. Eight diners share a secluded table for an 11-course meal paired with six wines. The monthly menus are highly guarded, as the chefs want them to be surprises. I failed miserably trying to take notes from Tiffany’s description of each course.

In order to make the dinner, I had to cancel my tour of Namibia’s stunning meeting of dunes and ocean, which I had visited in the past. The silver lining is that I was on the ship for the choir performance by children from the Bernhard Nordkamp Center.

A number of years ago passengers on Holland America cruises visiting Namibia started a relationship with this after-school program in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital. The group traveled five hours by bus to visit the ship and perform. Earlier, passengers and officers first contributed items for a silent auction and then generously bid on them. The result was a donation that eventually neared $25,000. I never saw who won my watercolors, but was glad to see they contributed to the cause.

Tonight was an annual favorite in the Pinnacle – the Jellicle dinner. Its only constants are that the dinner occurs on April Fool’s Day and is named after the Jellicle Cats from the Cats musical and T.S. Eliot’s poetry.

In 2023, each course looked like one kind of food but tasted like another. For example, the “sunny side up egg” was a palate cleanser of mango granata and ice cream.

This year Tiffany took course themes from books by Roald Dahl, starting with delicious bread in the form of a book, accompanied by chive, anchovy and plain butter.

Our Witches salad was a master of molecular gastronomy, with deconstructed elements of a Greek salad, including gels and jellies and a goat cheese snow.

George’s Marvellous Medicine was a base of steamed egg custard topped with pork consommé with summer vegetables.

Certainly they wouldn’t serve us real slugs for Curried Slugs? No, they didn’t, but escargot filled in nicely, with a Thai green curry sauce and fermented rice pancakes.

Matilda’s Chocolate Cake looked as expected – except surely it was too early for a dessert course. Instead, it was an incredibly tender beef tenderloin with a chocolate mole sauce, edible gold leaf and a basket of vegetable “candies.”

As this year’s palate cleanser course, we had the peach (sorbet) and Miss Spider (chocolate) from James and the Giant Peach.

Finally, Tiffany came out with bad news. In a terrible kitchen accident, they dropped the last course, Willy Wonka’s Lemon Experiment. Despite the April Fool’s Joke, even “broken” the lemon meringue was delicious.

Early today, Tom, Monika and I managed to prank our friend Deb, who left the world cruise in Singapore and plans to return when we are in Athens. I knew my text would reach her in the middle of the night in Kansas, but I didn’t expect an immediate response. She may not forgive me.

I expected to see a few costumes around the ship tonight for April Fool’s Day, but this year the passengers and crew outdid themselves. I felt under-costumed in my simple devil’s horn headband. The captain may have won the prize – I walked right by him and had to rely on friends for a photograph.

At the risk of including too many photos, I’ll just provide a sampling here. I need to start thinking about something more creative for next year.