Karryon chats to Azamara’s Corporate Executive Chef Colin Jones about being vegan in the kitchen and bringing plant-based eats to luxury ships.
Meat meet Colin Jones, Azamara’s travelling Corporate Executive Chef who is quietly making waves by bringing vegan options to the buffet and beyond for an innovative dining experience at sea.
When we catch up with Colin aboard Azamara Quest in New Zealand in January 2023, he has been delivering fleet-wide training since June 2022, going from ship to ship to check for consistent standards across the board.
Home for this cruising chef is Wallasey near Liverpool in northwest England, and he started in country house hotels in the UK before moving onto ships in 2007.
Colin came aboard Holland America Line as an Executive Chef before joining Azamara in November 2021.
As Azamara’s Corporate Executive Chef, his role involves everything from recruitment, training and development of staff to menu design, recipe creation and produce procurement.
In the kitchen
Cruise ships, like hotels, are a masterclass in planning, sourcing, preparation, execution and service to feed the masses multiple meals in several restaurants daily.
Rinse, repeat and pass the salt.
It’s an intensive, busy environment where chefs either sink or swim.
“Logistically, there’s a lot of moving parts when it comes to being on a ship,” he says.
“Something might not get loaded or imported or there might be a safety drill where everybody has to leave their stations for an hour. Somebody might go on vacation or somebody misses the plane, which has happened quite a lot lately.
“So, you’ve got to be really adaptable and you’ve got to be calm,” adds the softly spoken chef in his Scouse lilt.
The Azamara culinary difference
Luxury cruise line Azamara, which operates four boutique small ships on worldwide itineraries, has the latitude to take a hands-on approach with its menus and meals.
Each Azamara ship has an average of 660 guests on board with 60 cooks in the ship galley. For comparison, Holland America Line has around 2,200 guests and 94 cooks.
Everything is freshly handmade daily on Azamara ships – from the breakfast pastries to sauces. Colin has also just rolled out an accelerated apprentice program that takes cooks from commis or trainee chef to chef de partie (head chef) in just 18 months.
“It’s a great learning platform for cooks. We purchase food locally in ports – such as green lip mussels in New Zealand. Some of the chefs had never seen them before and we show them how to cook them. That is the fun part of the job as well,” Colin says.
“Azamara is also a smaller, more refined operation and the chefs have more of a free hand with some of the food as well – they can put their own touches on it.”
A vegan chef on board
Colin has been vegan since 2006, which he says does not affect his ability to create meat-based dishes.
“I love all kinds of food. I love putting it together and I love tasting it. But eating food and tasting it are two different things,” he explains.
“When I do a meat sampling, I know what I’m looking at, I know the smell of it and I know how it looks. And you know, I do taste it.
“But when you taste 60 pieces of meat, whether you’re a carnivore or a vegetarian or vegan, it’s the same as a wine, coffee or cheese tasting – you taste it and then you spit it out.”
He says the plant-based meals are a response to the demand for healthier options from a new generation of cruisers.
“I enjoy eating and cooking plant-based items and I like the challenge,” he says of experimenting and creating vegan dishes.
“So, from that point of view, I still recall the flavours [of meat] when putting a menu together. But if I’m sitting down for a meal, I’ll put what I want on the plate and it’s all healthy, nutritious, plant-based foods.”
Plant-based dining at sea
Alongside intensive staff training and new supplier procurement for Azamara, Colin has developed a wider variety of vegan dishes, incorporating plant-based dining into the ships.
“There’s a freedom of movement with buffets. The market is always changing and always growing. We are getting more people on board who want to eat healthier and want the option, so we’re providing it.”
Azamara offers plant-based options in its buffet eateries and cafes alongside other dietary requirements such as gluten-free and sugar-free items.
On the menu
At premium restaurants Prime C and Aqualina as well as the open-seating Discoveries, diners can order from a dedicated vegan menu, which often has sophisticated plant-based duplicates of the main menu such as a tuna tartare made of watermelon and a Beyond Meat steak and burgers.
Plant-based meals on Azamara have been fleshed out from a supporting role to a main character, fully realised, full of flavour and fully delicious.
“We did a full menu presentation for Prime C where we made all the meat dishes with Beyond Meat and used watermelon for the tuna and shrimp. It was really about educating and training the team on how to cook and make the food,” he says.
Colin has plans to eventually offer plant-based options for all dishes on board.
“At the moment, we have a separate vegan menu. If people are on a cruise for 15 days, they don’t want to eat meat every day anyway. So, a lot of the food items were already offered, it was just identifying them as ‘vegan’ as well,” Colin explains.
“I go out to restaurants with my wife and they don’t always have a particularly wide variety of plant-based options. I like to go out and enjoy myself, the same as everyone else, and diners on board our ships also like to eat from the same menu and have the same options as their dining partners.”
Next for Azamara
After launching Azamara’s newest ship Onward, since June 2022 Colin has visited the entire fleet to standardise recipes and quality operations while he creates the cruise line’s new culinary operating procedures.
He is also working on a refreshed room service menu and the debut of a new dessert and bread program in 2023.
Azamara has also focused on destination dishes that reflect the areas where the ships sail as well as live-action stations that bring theatre to the lunchtime and dinner buffets, highlighting world cuisines such as Spanish, Indonesian, Greek and Indian.
“We have a 14-day dinner menu with 20-odd dishes on it with six or seven main courses, including the world cuisine,” Colin says of recent menu updates.
“We always offer the classics but more than signature dishes, our guests enjoy the events such as the White Night Party and the brunches so it’s more about the overall experience than any particular dish.”
Read our cruise review aboard the luxe Azamara Quest in New Zealand here.
For more info, head to azamara.com