Oceania Cruises is spreading out its largest tablecloth ever with the arrival of Oceania Vista, its first new ship in more than a decade set to spend the winter sailing season brining its culinary offerings on cruises out of Miami.
The 67,700-gross-ton, 1,200-guest ship that features 11 dining venues is the largest in the now seven-ship Oceania Cruises fleet, but only slightly over the line’s last two ships Marina and Riviera. A sister ship to Vista named Allura is due in 2025.
Oceania is the upper premium sister line to Norwegian Cruise Line and has looked to carve out a unique space focusing on both on-board offerings and destination excursions that cater to the gourmand while not growing too large for its target demographic.
“We really felt there was a huge space in between the premium brands who are actually moving more of mass market because they were building bigger ships — Celebrity, Holland America, Princess,” said cruise line President Frank A. Del Rio. “They left their old premium formats and started going more contemporary so we kind of snuck in between.”
Vista builds on the line’s prowess, once again relying on menus from famed French chef Jacques Pépin, who has been the line’s executive culinary director for two decades, but guests might be surprised to not find his signature restaurant Jacques on board in favor of a new concept called Ember.
“Jacques is not really out in a way because we are cautious of what we have done by introducing Ember,” said Oceania Cruises’ Senior Culinary Director Alexis Quaretti. Instead, his French dishes can be found in the main dining room with a different appetizer, entrée and dessert every day, enough for a 14-day sailing.
That opened up the space to create Ember, which is built to resemble the tasting room of a Napa Valley vineyard serving American farm-to-table fare including dishes conceived by Pépin.
“So, yes, it is a different atmosphere but definitely I love very much Ember, with its nice design, the wood effect, and at least we can still have some of the Jacques Pépin dishes on a daily basis in the main dining room,” Quaretti said.
Ember’s menu includes things like blackened crab cakes with corn salsa and tomato sauce; roasted beetroot salad with goat cheese, shallots, green beans and hazelnuts; porcini-dusted bone-in ribeye with foie gras-truffle demi-glace and breadcrumb-crusted tomato Provençale; and roasted apple tart with served with San Francisco favorite Humphry Slocombe-brand sweet summer corn ice cream.
Also lending her celebrity name to the ship is godmother Giada De Laurentiis, who has for now two signature dishes in the ship’s Italian offering Toscana as well as in the Grand Dining Room including her specialty of lemon spaghetti with jumbo shrimp.
Another new venue to Vista is the Aquamar Kitchen, a healthy concept that combines a family-style table setting that spills over into al fresco outdoor seating.
While it has make-your-own poke bowls and four kinds of avocado toast, there is plenty of indulgence to found within the menu as well such as the butternut squash soup, yellowfin tuna tacos with guacamole, crunchy chicken sandwich with chipotle mayo and the buffalo mozzarella tomato basil panini. Plus it has fresh juices and smoothies such as the spicy sweet “Pure Immunity,” which is OJ, ginger, turmeric and cayenne pepper.
The venue is packed during sailings as it offers a variety of options that set it apart from other lunch fare on board.
Another packed venue is the Baristas coffee bar now with its own bakery that serves up sweet and savory pastries throughout the day.
For those who enjoy learning the art of cooking, the ship offers the largest ever version of The Culinary Center, now with 24 individual cooking stations. For an extra cost, those on board can partake from dozens of new options pulling from a fleetwide library of more than 100 classes designed by the line’s culinary enrichment director and executive chef Kathryn Kelly.
Kelly introduced the kitchen on Oceania’s Marina, and it has since been on board Riviera and the new ships of sister cruise line Regent Seven Seas.
“It’s been an absolute joy ride to develop a program that guests come in — some of them are very talented home chefs, others have never picked up a knife — and have them tell our chefs that it was the experience of a lifetime.”
She says the classes have evolved just as those who have sailed.
“Ten to 15 years ago, when we were teaching cooking classes, we would get on a map and say, ‘Can I show you where you are? Do you even know what country you’re in? ‘ And now it’s not. It’s like, ‘There’s 17 cuisines in Italy. How are they different?’ So we’re seeing that kind of migration of sophistication in a lot of guests that is really rewarding for us as educators.”
Also key to Oceania’s footprint in the market are the unique culinary excursions offered at each of its ports of call, something Kelly and her team spend curating throughout the year.
Kelly said it’s designed to satisfy guests that are thinking, “‘I’ve been to Florence and I’ve checked all the boxes. Now what I want to do is something a little different.’ So they want to be able to go off and explore and maybe take that afternoon and find that special little restaurant somewhere. … I think that the trends that we’re seeing are a little bit more adventuresome, people are feeling a lot more comfortable about sort of street food or more authentic indigenous kinds of foods.”
The ship stands apart from its predecessors with the majority of the interior spaces created by Miami-based Studio DADO, which also had a hand in the new Prima class of ships for Norwegian and spaces on board Regent Seven Seas ships as well.
“What we have to really do is sort of look at trends beyond our design world,” said Studio DADO founding partner Greg Walton “One of the things we look at and we nickname it — we call we’re future casting. We look at all kinds of design, from fashion to automobile design, what’s happening in every kind of industry that involves design, even looking at things like small household appliances.”
The ship’s dining venues in particular each feature a design story to be discovered. The Polo Club steakhouse, for instance, pulls on the history of polo, and how it originated in Persia, and thus a tiled entryway that resembled a Persian rug gives way to the more traditional English stylings within. It even pulls color schemes that pay deference to Wellington, Florida, the polo capital of the South.
Ember, though, is among Walton’s favorite new space, including the faux flame created by a mix of light and mist that provides atmosphere to what feels like a California vineyard.
“The big accomplishment in this space is the fireplace, because there’s no such thing as an open flame on a ship, not even in the galleys,” he said. “At night when you come in here, there’s people who walk up” and place their hand near the flame. He said even the scent of wooden logs under the fireplace lends itself to the sensory experience.
The line often sails to a variety of destinations skipped over by major cruise lines, often built around culinary adventures.
The Miami-based will visit ports including San Juan, Puerto Rico; Gustavia, St. Barts; Roseau, Dominica; Bridgetown, Barbados; St. George’s, Grenada; Castries, St. Lucia; St. John’s, Antigua; Fort-de-France, Martinique in the Eastern Caribbean and Costa Maya, Mexico; Roatan, Honduras; Colon, Panama; Santo Tomas, Guatemala; Puerto Limon, Costa Rica and Belize City, Belize in the Western Caribbean.
The ship begins its winter run Nov. 19 and runs through the end of March.
