On your own, you’d never get a bread baker in Rabat, Malta, to share every step to making his signature bread—but not today. Surrounding his oven are 18 wide-eyed students, all from Oceania Allura, the 1,200-guest ship docked in Valletta 30 minutes east. The bread is ftira, the country’s traditional sourdough, dense enough to double as a plate. By afternoon, the same guests will be folding the same loaf in a teaching kitchen four decks above the sea, with the flour the baker sold them on the way out. This is one stop on Oceania Cruises’ Culinary Discovery Tour, a 46-port program on the line’s four larger ships that caps at 18 guests and treats the market as the front end of an afternoon cooking class. In Provence, the morning is a truffle hunt. In Lisbon, the pastéis de nata at Pastéis de Belém; in Reykjavík, dawn at the harbor fish auction. While cooking classes on cruise ships have historically been a checkbox between bingo and the buffet, Oceania Cruises spent 15 years tearing the model apart and rebuilding it, plate by plate, port by port. Here’s how.
The strategy began with the size of the line’s vessels, which provide authentic access and intimacy. Oceania Allura, for instance, is small enough to slip into historical harbors like Valletta’s, while being large enough to accommodate the state-of-the-art Culinary Center, a $12 million teaching kitchen with 24 stations. It dates back to 2011, when the director of culinary enrichment, chef Kathryn Kelly, launched the program aboard Oceania Marina. It was billed as the first hands-on cooking school at sea, and the format has held.
The commitment runs deeper than the program on paper. Frank Del Rio helped found Oceania Cruises in 2002 and brought renowned chef and author Jacques Pépin in as executive culinary director before the first ship sailed in 2003, on the bet that the kitchen, not the spa or the casino, would be the reason a guest came back. Twenty-three years and eight ships later, Oceania Cruises runs more distinct dining venues per ship than any of its peers, all included without surcharge. Pépin, now 90, still serves as executive culinary advisor and consults on the menus. The day-to-day kitchens belong to executive culinary directors Alexis Quaretti and Eric Barale, the only two Maîtres Cuisiniers de France leading any cruise line’s culinary program. Together, they wrote the 270 new recipes that Oceania Allura brought into the fleet last year—perhaps the biggest news since Oceania Cruises became adults-only in January. Meanwhile, La Table par Maîtres Cuisiniers de France, the first restaurant at sea launched with the consortium’s prestigious approval, debuts on Oceania Sonata in 2027. Oceania Cruises trademarked The Finest Cuisine at Sea® two decades ago, and the food has to keep earning the phrase.
Mediterranean Voyage, the afternoon class on this stop, opens with the instructor walking the room and correcting technique by hand. The angle of a wrist. The temperature of a proving station. The shape of dough on the board. Across the room, the new Chef’s Studio runs in parallel: a smaller demo annex where guests sip wine and watch a single technique while the main class continues. This afternoon it is ġbejna, the Maltese sheep’s-milk cheeselet that hardens in baskets for a week. When the class breaks for tea, the loaves from station four make the rounds with butter and salt. Aboard Oceania Allura, one chef works for every eight guests; fleetwide, one for every ten.
Dinner takes the morning’s haul to its conclusion. The cellar master’s wine pairing table is set in a private room on Oceania Allura with 22 seats, and the amuse arrives with a glass of Girgentina, the indigenous Maltese white, paired against ftira and ricotta from the class. The pairings continue, ending with Meridiana’s Melqart, the Cabernet Sauvignon-Merlot blend from Ta’ Qali. Before dessert, the cellar master pulls a half-bottle of late-harvest Moscato from the cart and tells the room how it got into the cellar. The dish room is finishing the last of the plates as the day’s guests carry something off the ship and onto it: a loaf in a paper bag, the taste of ġbejna, a recipe folded into a notebook, the name of a Maltese grape they could not have pronounced at breakfast. Tomorrow it is Sicily and the morning fish market in Catania, then on through Corfu and Kotor and Dubrovnik, each port with its own baker and its own afternoon. This is what we’d call the joy of traveling—and tasting—well.
Discover the joy of traveling well at oceaniacruises.com.