National Geographic Cruises offer voyages that “bring together the legacy of National Geographic, with its long commitment to sharing and protecting world wonders, and the unparalleled expertise of Lindblad Expeditions, with its 50+ years of taking travelers to the planet’s remote and wild places.”
National Geographic Cruise dining
Recently, we had the chance to experience a National Geographic Cruise, and check out all of the experiences, expeditions, and — our focus today — food the voyage has to offer. So, what’s it like to eat on a National Geographic Cruise? This is what we found…
So, before we get into our thoughts on the food itself, a quick rundown of how dining on a National Geographic Cruise:
- Breakfast and lunch are served buffet style in the outdoor cafe area, weather permitting. Each of these meals is served for an hour, and after that hour, they are closed FAST from our observation.
- Dinner is served in an indoor dining room (which will also serve breakfast and lunch only in the event of bad weather). The first night was a buffet dinner, while the following nights were sit-down, course meals. Each night, you can choose your table and, in turn, sit with different people, including the Nat Geo specialists on board.
- Of note with dinner, the day’s entrees are posted in the morning, with cruisers asked to make a tentative selection as a way to lessen food waste and allow the crew to judge how much of each item will be needed on a given day. If you wanted more than one entree, you could check more than one box. If you changed your mind by dinner time, that was also allowed. We LOVED this idea.
Choose your dining option
- In addition to those meal times, there’s a “high tea” offered in the lounge options, including finger sandwiches and charcuterie plates, including locally sourced meats, in the late afternoon.
- In addition, some snacks, including fruit, cookies, cereal bars, breadsticks, dried fruit, and coffee, are available in the Observation Lounge.
- Drinks are always available at the bar (located in the lounge). This included sodas, coffee, tea, and alcohol. There are also multiple water bottle filling stations around the boat. They provide reusable NatGeo water bottles that you can keep as a souvenir.
- There was no room service option.
All of this being said, it is important to note that outside of these scheduled mealtimes, there aren’t many — if any — options for off-schedule meals on the ship.
Let’s move on to the food itself. To put it bluntly: The food was incredible. We found it to be a top-notch, full gourmet offering with lots of options for every palate. Each night there were multiple offerings for soup, salad, appetizer, and main courses, including vegetarian options. The food was always restaurant quality. If you are looking for chicken strips or pizza, this is not the cruise for you.
Dining options
Bread and butter varieties, as well as included wine pairings, changed each night. Dessert was usually two choices: a specialty type dessert or a sorbet.
Desserts
From our observation, allergies are also taken very seriously. We had a guest in our media group with some allergies, and the chef always came out to tell her what she was safe to eat.
Steak
Some of the standouts included steak frites, an exceptional Caesar salad, and some incredible vegetarian dishes made with locally sourced ingredients from the ship’s ports of call.
Charcuterie
Suffice to say, we loved the majority of the dining options and operations offered on National Geographic’s cruise. Stay tuned to DFB for further coverage of this voyage.
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Do these food offerings sway you to consider a NatGeo cruise? Let us know in the comments below.
Disclosure: In nearly all circumstances, Disney Food Blog writers and photographers pay full price for their own travel, hotel, food, beverage, and event tickets. We do this because it’s important to us as journalists to ensure not only that we give you unbiased opinions, but also that you can trust us to do so since we’re paying our own way. On rare occasions, when we are invited by a company to attend a preview as media, and when we choose to accept that invitation, we will always make you, our readers, aware of that situation. Today, we were invited by Disney to take a NatGeo Cruise. Note that when we attend events as media we are 1) Not required to review that event/food on any of our channels, and 2) Not required to review that event/food favorably. You can always count on DFB to give you a 100% unbiased and honest review of any event that we attend, food that we eat, or beverage that we drink. You can see more in our Disclosure Policy. Thank you for reading. — AJ
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Very concise and informative article. I’d like to see more food photos though. I hope these appear in some of the future articles about this cruise.