How to eat vegan on Icon of the Seas
Royal Caribbean has a new giant cruise ship, Icon of the Seas, which has a large selection of food options.
Overall, if you are a foodie looking for excellent vegan food, I would not particularly recommend this cruise. Royal Caribbean certainly will make your vegan life livable, but overall, vegan options are mediocre in quality and while protein was always findable, it was not always easy; vegans will not feel particularly catered-to.
That said, this was my first cruise as a vegan so I have nothing to compare it to except how I eat at home. I don’t get the sense that cruises typically have excellent vegan menus, so vegans with low expectations will likely find themselves quite happy on this cruise.
I did a weeklong cruise on Icon in a group of eight, all of us vegan or vegetarian. Here’s what we learned:
On the ship
The main food places to eat are Windjammer (casual buffet) and Main Dining (semi formal, restaurant affair). But throughout the ship there are also many smaller places to get food, mostly free. (There are paid options but we didn’t evaluate those—everything here is included with the cruise.)
Main Dining
First of all: main dining always has a vegan complete dinner option. Every day there was a vegan starter, vegan main and vegan dessert. For me, the best starter was tortilla soup, best main was a very strange-looking but tasty blackened-tofu taco, and best dessert was brownies. But I only ate at the main dining room three times over the course of the week, because I looked at the menus and frequently wasn’t excited about the food due to lack of protein or simply looking boring (none of us are fans of stuffed eggplant).
Vegetarian options are a bit more frequent—of the ~6 offered starters each day, 1 is vegan and 2 are vegetarian, and of the ~8 mains, 1 is vegan and another 1 is vegetarian. Sometimes an item labeled vegetarian is easily veganized: for example, I was able to customize a minestrone soup to omit some kind of dairy topping. The waitstaff won’t always know, but they will happily convey your question to the chefs about whether something can be veganized.
They also had vegan ice cream options for dessert every day, but I didn’t order it from the main dining, suspecting it was the same as those available at Windjammer.
Windjammer
While you can browse the buffet and look for vegan options, the best options are rarely presented, so the best trick is to ask for something specific that you want. There are a ton of staff and they are not always well trained on what is available, so if one crewmember doesn’t know, ask someone else!
There are different types of crew you can make requests of. Sometimes the cooks at the stations are useful, but the most helpful are the sous chefs—they’re dressed in a blue apron, wandering around the buffet, coordinating things and checking on the quality of the food. If you ask them for vegan options they will search in the back for ingredients, talk to the cooks and unlock some magic:
- Tofu scramble for breakfast, as well as tofu added to stir fry or pasta at other meals. These are made with boxed tofu (the pasteurized shelf-stable non-refrigerated kind)—they didn’t even always cook it—but certainly edible and protein-y!
- Vegan pancakes for breakfast. These were disappointing in texture (probably because this special batter is both vegan and gluten free).
- Veggie burgers—these are labeled as an option at the grill station, but you have to ask and wait. The veggie burgers appear to be bean-based premade frozen patties that they throw on the grill (and flagging that we didn’t verify explicitly that they are vegan, so ask to be sure!)
- Vegan desserts—often left over from main dining. If they don’t have any at the beginning of the week, they may have some later on! We got one crewmember to bring our group a giant plate of vegan brownies and cookies on Thursday that we munched through for the last couple of days of our cruise.
In general the sous chefs seem pretty willing to go digging in the storeroom to fulfill special requests, but they may just not stock a lot of stuff you want (I didn’t ask specifically, but I don’t think I saw any form of seitan or tempeh all week). And these special requests can take a while, sometimes up to 20 minutes to fulfill.
Soy and almond milk is always available. At breakfast it was put out on a refrigerated plate, but for lunch/dinner we had to ask for it. Once they gave us the entire box of Silk to share :)
Windjammer infrequently has vegan protein mains out on the buffet. One day they had falafel, one day beans, one day I think they had dal, but often they had nothing of interest to me. Indian vegetarian options (milk but no eggs) were available most days, if you like Indian food and are willing to consume a little milk.
If you’re not overly focused on getting vegan protein, you can usually put a decent salad together at the salad bar, and there are always plenty of carbs like bread and rice, fruits, avocado toasts, as well as grilled vegetables/etc.
For dessert at dinnertime, Windjammer had occasional vegan desserts and always had a vegan ice cream, usually strawberry, but once it was vanilla. Both were ok but neither was great. Top it with fruit and chocolate shavings (flagging that I didn’t explicitly verify whether the chocolate was vegan).
Labels at the buffet don’t include ingredients, so if you’re not sure, ask. (Be careful; we overheard someone asking whether an Indian paneer dish contained milk; the staff said “it has coconut milk”, implying lack of dairy which was untrue!)
AquaDome Market
This is an indoor “food court” style dining area on deck 15 with several options. They have a falafel bar which always can make a vegan falafel sandwich, a grilled sandwich bar with veggie option, and a stir fry bar which always has tofu. We ended up eating here several times.
Pearl Cafe
This is a modern cafe style indoor dining area on deck 6 with premade snack food, including toasties; they usually had a very tasty vegan toasted mushroom and cheese sandwich. They might have had a vegan pastry once too. This is the only place where soy milk was “on tap” instead of just in a box. One of the premade snacks was a hummus crudité plate; annoyingly this plate also comes with a ranch dressing. No vegan proteins that I saw.
Park Cafe
This is a cafe style outdoor/indoor dining area surrounded by pretty greenery on deck 8. It is very cozy. I only discovered this on the last day so I didn’t survey it often enough to know what is reliably on offer there but they do have a selection of salads, and sometimes vegan sandwiches. When I went they had an exciting-looking breakfast sandwich—tofu scramble on ciabatta, which was unfortunately rather poorly executed (soggy bread).
Sorrento’s Pizza
This is an indoor New York style pizzeria on deck 5. They make pizzas constantly during busy times; normally they just crank out a variety of pizzas (all with dairy cheese) by the slice, but you can ask the cook to make you a pizza with vegetables and no cheese and they will do it happily on a 5 minute turnaround. I don’t think they have vegan cheese though.
El Loco Fresh
This is an outdoor Mexican style taqueria on deck 15. You might be able to put together a decent-looking bean burrito; I didn’t do this even once so I can’t comment on its quality, but it is an option. (These particular beans are labeled as containing pork; I don’t remember for sure that they had vegetarian beans, sorry!)
Basecamp
Mostly an outdoor grill on deck 15 with hot dogs and such, but for vegans, they only have tater tots and pretzel bites, and I’m not even sure the pretzel bites are 100% vegan (I suspect butter is involved) but I ate a few anyway.
Port days
Our cruise stopped at three ports: Basseterre (St. Kitts), Charlotte Amalie (St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands) and CocoCay (Bahamas) and started and ended in Miami.
St. Kitts had a wonderful little outdoor casual vegan Caribbean restaurant not too far from the port (<10m by taxi or 30m by foot) called Ital Creations. I recommend making the trip for this one, it was a highlight.
St. Thomas had an in-port Caribbean vegan fast food bar called Speedy Redemption. We got a big scoop of mac and cheese alongside a “lentil loaf” and other veggies; the quality wasn’t amazing but it was still satisfying and definitely worth getting off the boat for given how convenient it is.
CocoCay had an ok taco bar with beans, and it’s free (CocoCay is a private island owned by the cruise company, and the way they’ve set it up, cruise benefits like free food extend to the island). We didn’t find any soymilk or vegan desserts here though.
For Miami, we found two places we really liked. The Cocinita in Brickell is an all-vegan South American restaurant that had some very tasty filled plantain pancakes. And Love Life Cafe in Wynwood was a wonderful highlight, with a wide variety of all-vegan food including a very unique sushi pizza (!), quesadillas, bowls, sandwiches as well as multiple cheesecake options for dessert.
Overall tips for cruises
It was good to make a bit of a fuss. By the end, several crewmembers recognized us as the vegan group and would be more likely to have stuff ready for us when we asked, and we started to know who to look for to make our special requests. I hope this leads to better options (or even simply better labeling!) for future vegans too. Please do your part by making lots of special vegan requests and maybe that will be an impetus to improve their policies and be more veg-friendly :)
Improvement suggestions for Icon
If anyone from the cruise ship is reading this, here are some low-cost suggestions which would have improved my food experience on Icon substantially:
- Improve buffet labels: consistently label the big 8 allergens.
- Mark which main dining options are easily veganized.
- Have available proteins at the ready rather than having to make a special request! The stir fry station should have tofu ready (it’s crazy that it doesn’t), and the tofu scramble should be quicker to get at breakfast.
- Wherever possible, stock more plant-based proteins across the buffet. For example, the stirfry station could have a seitan-based mock duck, and the salad bar and pasta station could have tempeh crumbles and soy bacon bits.
- In the dining room each day there should be a vegan main with at least 20g of protein.