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The shortage of necessary materials in a cruise ship dining room is a serious issue, but not for the reason one might think. Each waiter is assigned a specific amount of silverware and a single rack to hold it. Fanatically guarding your silver is a matter of course on Carnival ships, and every rack is profoundly labeled. Because names are extremely confusing on ships (what, with 60 nationalities aboard), many draw pictures instead. As the only American waiter in the fleet, I drew the Stars & Stripes, which may or may not have been more intimidating than my colleague who covered his rack with superbly drawn, realistically creepy bats. Anyone caught ‘borrowing’ from a waiter’s soiled rack during mealtime faced a severe reprimand. Anyone caught pinching clean silver risked decapitation. At the end of the first seating, waiters would rush their silver to the dishwasher and refuse to leave until the precious cargo was fully cleaned and accounted for. Those who simply hadn’t the time for such protection were forced to rely on the goodwill of the dishwashers to keep prying hands away. Needless to say, dishwashers enjoyed a healthy gratuity for ensuring this “goodwill”. We waiters did not begrudge them, as our less-than minimum wage was generous compared to a dishwasher’s salary. At first, I was disgusted with Carnival’s apparent inability to supply their employees with necessary equipment. Every station was required to have X number of saucers, water glasses, wine glasses, silverware, side plates, coffee cups, etc. Yet there was simply never enough of any of these items. Absurdly, a nightly inventory was required and all items were displayed openly upon the tables for counting. Specialty items in particularly high demand, like butter dishes (because guests stole them, too), were exposed for all to pinch (steal). So after all that hard work serving guests, waiters endured unpaid guard duty over their stations and waited for the appropriate manager to OK their station. After being cleared and departing, thieving packs of waiters descended upon these stations to gather what they needed for their own inspection. For, to pass the inventory, a waiter was required to steal from another that had already been designated as fully stocked. A nasty consequence of this was that waiters arrived at their stations an hour early—off the clock—to steal it back. Or as much as they could, anyway. The whole thing was bizarre, and completely inimical to the cruise line’s insatiable and unrealistic demands for superior service. Only after observing the restaurant staff did I begin to understand Carnival’s policy. The attitude of most waiters was one of extreme indifference towards property. Breakage was exceptionally high because no one cared about the cost. Carnival was a billion-dollar sweat-shop, so why should an over-worked, under-paid waiter care if he dropped a cup? But twenty broken cups a night on each of twenty ships added up in a hurry! By demanding that each station be equipped completely and enforcing it nightly, Carnival threw the responsibility right back onto the waiters. Breakage was thusly low. Frustration thusly high. Any waiter wanting to get tipped by all his guests—his only salary for the whole cruise—had to focus on preventing breakage. How else can you make happy twenty-six guests simultaneously demanding coffee when you only have ten cups and eight saucers? Pinching on the go was mandatory. Yet even legitimate accidents did not guarantee replacement of necessary equipment. The system was brutal but effective; a metaphor for all things at sea. For more back of the house surprises, my book Cruise Confidential is full of them. I ran the gamut of the restaurants, from busboy up to management (and back down to waiter!). Brian David Bruns

*Warning: profanity implied within (only implied, but we’re talkin’ about sailors here…) New York Stock Exchange on a Sunday night. Bourbon Street on a Monday morning. Cruise ship kitchen on a galley tour. All are silent, empty sights unable to convey the absolute bedlam and pandemonium perpetrated there daily. The echoes have died, the detritus of maelstrom removed: ticker tape swept, bottles recycled, grills scraped. I understand the desire to join a galley tour, but it really is useless in understanding the function of the place. For cruise ship galleys are not about equipment, nor layout, nor routine. They are not about the useless statistics guides boast of, of zillions of dishes served in mere minutes, etc. Cruise ship galleys are about the workers sweating and swearing and stealing within. Swearing and stealing? THAT never happened at the chef’s table inside the kitchen, you say. Yeah, and I’m sure your teenage kids behave exactly the same when you’re gone as they do when you’re watching. Galley tours are organized groups pulsing through shiny stainless steel corridors like blood pumping through a healthy heart; meal times are a violent cardiac arrest, with bodies straining against blockage. As time ticks by the heart palpitates and everyone and everything pushes harder, louder, more erratically. But bodies pooling by the front line have nowhere to go. Pressure rises and things turn ugly. Eventually at every meal something will rupture and waiters will scamper and steal every which way, like internal bleeding. Too graphic a metaphor, you think? Hardly. It’s a jungle in there. Cruise ship waiters squabble over hash browns like hyenas fighting for scraps stolen from a lion’s kill. It’s survival of the fittest. I will never, ever forget the first time I was assigned to pick up the hot food at breakfast in the dining room on Carnival Conquest. I had been given sixteen orders simultaneously. So had everyone else. Simultaneously. “Hi, chef,” I began, “I need, uh, six orders of eggs over-easy, two with pancakes, one with bacon, one with pancakes and bacon, two with sausage and bacon, and one with pancakes, sausage, bacon, and hash browns. I need two orders of eggs over-hard with pancakes and sausage, and…” “New boy, out of my way,” interrupted another waiter. He bellowed, “SIX OVER-HARD, PANCAKES, BACON, BROWNS! Let’s go!” “Hey, Filipino,” an Indian waiter chided. “Leave the guy alone. Chef, ignore him and the American. Help a fellow Indian. Give me four scrambled, two with browns, four with….” “Rasclat, get your hands off my pancakes!” “Hey!” everyone cried as a Bulgarian butt in. “Those are my hash browns, you bastard! I need four scrambled, two with bacon, one with sausage, and one with browns.” “F@*# you! Chef, are those my hash browns?” “Kiss my ass, Euro-boy. Colonize someone else!” “Hey, why are you giving him my eggs?” I asked. “America never colonized anybody.” “You bomb everybody. Take my oil but not my eggs!” “What blood clot took my over-easies? Chef, lay those eggs faster!” “Do I look like a chicken to you? You know any black chickens, motherf@*#er?” “Get your f@*#ing jelly off my tray, a$#hole!” “How you say chicken in your white-monkey language?” “F@*# you!” “No, f@*# you!” “F@*# you both. Were are my sausages? Not the f@*#ing links, the f@*#ing patties, blood clot!” At that point everyone dropped civility and the language turned truly ugly. The kicker? Breakfast in the dining room involved only about 10% of the waiters aboard. Enjoy the tour, ‘cause you sure as Hell don’t wanna be in there during a real dinner.

1912, North Atlantic Ocean 1952, Trianon Palace Hotel, Versailles 2012, Lake Las Vegas What do these three locations have in common? A sunken unsinkable ship. Duh. We’ll all heard of the ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic. We all know she was built for the super-rich, having the most elegant designs, the newest technologies, the oldest wines, and Europe’s finest chefs. We’ve all seen the movie—unless you’re a heartless communist. (Just kidding). Many of us know the immortal names associated with Titanic, such as Captain E.J. Smith or passengers John Jacob Astor and—everybody’s favorite—Unsinkable Molly Brown. But few of us know that we can still enjoy a taste of Titanic. Yes, even us mere mortals. The Titanic was an Olympic-Class ocean liner featuring only the finest luxuries and opulence. The rich wood-paneled B-Deck Café Parisian and D-Deck Dining Saloon were focal points, offering the finest cuisine for the first-class passengers prepared by famed European chefs of the day. Of the 3,547 passengers on the maiden voyage, 416 ‘First Class’ passengers paid the equivalent of US$124,000 to experience the finest, most elegant, most luxurious, most whatever—choose your own superlative—dining experience the world had to offer. Though the diners unfortunately went down with the ship, the recipes did not. In 1952 the father and son chefs of the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles recreated items from the doomed liner’s famed menu. Their grandson listened on as they discussed the planning, preparation, and service to the guests at the Trianon. "I have never forgotten," recalls the now third-generation Chef E. Bernard. "I have always remembered tales of the Titanic Dinner prepared by my father and grandfather in Versailles ... and I have dreamed of following in their footsteps by offering such a unique dining experience here, too." Chef E. Bernard's vision has now become reality. "Diner du Titanic" (to dine on the Titanic) is a weekly offering at his lakeside Bernard's Bistro Restaurant Lake Las Vegas. The desert wastes mere miles from where 119 nuclear bombs were set off may seem an odd—if not impossible—location to rekindle oceanic glory. But this is Vegas, baby. Starting at seven bells shipboard time (7 p.m. for others), those booking passage at Lake Las Vegas will be given a White Star Line "Boarding Pass" and offered an unhurried evening of sumptuous epicurean dining. Music of the day will be played on piano, violin and guitar – recreating the same make-up of musicians that played aboard the Titanic. Various special decorative touches will help complete this bygone shipboard ambience and elegant dining experience. The first menu of the Titanic dining series offered dishes drawn from the actual First Class menu on the ship's maiden voyage. While the menu varies from week to week, each meal is based on actual dishes either served aboard the Titanic or those prepared by world-class chefs for the White Star Line sister-ships, the R.M.S. Olympic and R.M.S. Britannic. For the full experience, I recommend first taking the Titanic tour at the Luxor, where you can see actual artifacts plucked from the ocean’s depths. You’ll be immersed in the moment far more than you thought possible. Why, they even give you a boarding pass from an actual passenger of the ill-fated cruise. Only at the end, after being awed and astonished by the luxury, then crushed by the tragedy, will you discover whether or not ‘you’ survived. For those intimidated by a lavish five-course meal, Chef Bernard offers an elegant three-course alternative. Each seating begins with a glass of Champagne, followed by the European-style gourmet dinner courses, and finally ends hours later with fabulous pastries prepared from the actual pastry recipes of the Titanic's First Class dining room. The full meal costs only $65 per person, or $45 for the lighter fare. Better yet, there is no chance whatsoever in Hell of encountering an iceberg—not even in Las Vegas. Nor is anybody firing off nuclear weapons anymore, either. You simply can’t go wrong. (Unless you are sidetracked by the roulette wheel, of course). By the way, a first-class menu from the Titanic’s last lunch was recently auctioned for $117,320. Kept by a prominent San Francisco banker named Washington Dodge—after being found in the purse of his wife, who survived the tragedy—it was dated April 14th, 1912 and featured several courses, such as eggs Argenteuil, consomme fermier and chicken a la Maryland. By Brian David Bruns, author of national best-seller Cruise Confidential. Pics of the people and places I blog about are on my website and FB pages, join me! www.BrianDavidBruns.com https://www.facebook.com/BrianDavidBruns