When you choose a trip to Antarctica, you’re going for the experience of being at the bottom of the world. The pictures, videos and actually being there is also pretty awesome. All those factors included … the most popular questions I’ve been asked since I came back from the ship …

How was the food on the ship?
How was the food in Antarctica?

These are pretty straightforward questions, given that you’re on a ship for 6-8 days. You should know how the food is going to be and in the end, my opinion of the food was very, very good.  There is a bit of a disclaimer though … my food experience on the ship was a bit different because the Jamaican chef and the Guyanese maitre d’ happened to make it a very, very good trip for me. Those guys understood what I wanted from day 1 and I pretty much had my own custom meal every day on board.

On the second day, we had a BBQ onboard, as it was actually warmer on the ship than in Toronto at the same time … we had a reading of 14C.


If you’re wondering how the BBQ was done …

… I had custom meals everyday, hence your opinion might differ.

On the third day, it was back to the usual. I did find that there wasn’t a lot of fresh salads and vegetables on the cruise. This makes sense though, since everything has to be flown in from the mainland and I don’t recall seeing a lot of salads in Punta Arenas.

After the first three days, you’ve come to expect what the menus are going to look like. If you’re not a fan of dairy, then you need to tell them up front on your food questionnaire. They definitely tried to make it up to me. I even got a typical West Indian fish curry and that fish curry was damn good! Narendra was the Maitre D’ and he was one of the best I’ve seen in such restrictive circumstances.

I even had a chance to sit in on the team meetings and see how he orchestrated the restaurant crew. He’s definitely a high class professional.

During the final days crossing the Drake Passage, there were many people eating and I certainly didn’t head up to eat as I was completely sea sick during the crossing. As you can see from the menus, everything was well labelled and they did their absolute best to ensure that anyone with an allergy would be accommodated.