We did an 11 day cruise on the Regal Princess which is one of the biggest cruise ships, carrying around 3,700 passengers.  It was our first ever cruise.  Accordingly, hints and comments herein will be mostly valid for larger cruise ships and the Princess line in particular.

The brochures emphasised care-free travel in luxury but, for the Coeliac, it wasn’t quite the heaven they may have alluded to.  Having said that, the food was excellent, I did not get poisoned and I certainly did not go hungry.

The Regal Princess has around 700 staff just in the Food and Beverage division.  Later in our journey, we enjoyed a tour of the ship “behind the scenes” that few passengers experience and this gave us more insight into how things work.  Our tour included the kitchens and food preparation areas.

Prior to the trip we knew that the Princess Line had a good food reputation and they catered for gf diets.  I had also read on a few websites that you selected your meal for the next night 24 hours in advance.  This was written as though it was something good for reasons I could only guess at.  When booking we made the required gf request and knew we had to speak to the Maitre D’ when we boarded the ship.  Other than that, I really knew very little.

After boarding we tried to comply with the directions given but were told to speak to the head waiter in each restaurant (and there are a dozen of these on the Regal).  As it was only lunchtime, we wanted to eat at the buffet, not in one of the A la Carte restaurants, so this didn’t help much.  Despite the raft of information, both printed and on the ship app, we were still none the wiser.  Eventually I went back to the customer relations desk and pursued the matter.

To cut a long story short, this is what I eventually learned:

The food staff prepare nearly everything from scratch so they do know what is in most of the food.  However, not all serving staff have this knowledge.  Despite English being the ship language, most of the staff are not native English speakers so accents can make discussions tricky “Has this got gluten in it?”, “Yes, Sir there is sugar in this”.

The only things they do not make from raw ingredients are breakfast cereals, sauces in bottles (e.g. tomato sauce) and possibly some specialty items like ice-cream cones.  They make all the breads, cakes and pastries on-board.

Due to preparing vast amounts of food and compliance with standards they keep most food items separated (e.g. three or four cooks will only cut vegetables – all day! – and have no time to do anything else).  So cross contamination is usually unlikely.  Still, you need to watch to see if passengers are cross contaminating items in the buffet.  We saw soup being prepared in vats up to 650 litres in size!  They make all their own stocks as well.

Every food area has a head waiter or manager or head chef who does know what is OK to eat.  The problem can be finding them in a very busy area if you are not in one of the menu restaurants.  You need to speak to the head waiters every time.  As they can work rotating shifts, they won’t always be the person you talked to yesterday.

If you eat in the dining room restaurants then life is a bit easier.  Yes, the head waiter will bring you the next day’s menu in advance.  I deduced the reason for this is so they can pre-prepare any tricky items such as the pastry to wrap a Beef Wellington.  Whatever I ordered they produced a gf version of, so you are not limited to naturally gf menu items.  They also provided gf bread instead of the rolls everyone else got.  This was excellent – provided you knew what you wanted to eat tomorrow!  I did not pre-order desserts; I just said surprise me each night and they brought whatever was gf.

I went to the pizza restaurant and asked if I could have a gf pizza.  Yes, it arrived a little slower than other meals but that was OK.  I did not ask if I could get gf pizza from the poolside pizza and hot dog stand as I strongly suspected they did not do specialty catering there.

One small buffet runs continuously for snackers or people that missed a meal.  The gf desserts are signed here.  I had about 10 different desserts overall.  However the “normal” people have a HUGE range of food items (they cater for many nationalities, not just Americans) and can eat what they want, when they want.  For Coeliacs I did not see any sandwiches, any biscuits (cookies), brownies or pastries such as Danishes or donuts ever available.  Perhaps if specially ordered they would do it but the concept of snacking is not pre-ordering.  (Of course if I ate healthier things like fruit for snacks I would have been OK!)

I prefer cereal for breakfast and make my own muesli mixtures at home.  On board I found just one sad box of gf cereal in the breakfast buffets.  Not even a nice one.  Each morning I had to hunt it down (there are 3 or 4 cereal stations alone) or ask if I couldn’t find it.  I think there was only one or two other Coeliac passengers eating cereal, despite the large numbers on board.   I added to this a selection of dried or fresh fruit to recreate something like my normal brekkie.  As always, improvising is a good skill.

To eat at the buffet you needed to get a supervising chef to tell you what was ok.  You walk along the line and he says “No, no, no, yes, no, no, no, no, yes, no”.  You get the picture…  As we were on-shore at lunchtime most days, the rest of the time I avoided the buffet generally and went to the pizza restaurant for lunch.

To sum up, I would be quite happy to cruise again with Princess.  However to ensure you stay gf you will have to make an effort to talk to food preparers – the gf food will not just arrive automatically.  And, as always, you have to suffer as everyone else gets anything they desire just by putting it on their (often overloaded) plate while you have to make do with the one dessert that is gf.