Survey and write
We walk all four galleys, sign growers in six ports and write the recipe library with your sous chefs.
A culinary programme for Northstar's four ships, written aboard with your chefs and cooked from the first Barcelona sailing in April 2027.
Prepared for Helena, Marcus, Teodor and Priya. 31 October 2026.
Sail the routeFour lines from your brief and your guest survey. We've read each one as an instruction.
"Guests come home talking about Naples. Nobody comes home talking about dinner."Helena, Chief Hotel Officer. RFP section 2.
"Our back-to-back guests have eaten the same seven nights twice by the second Sunday."Marcus, VP Food and Beverage. Kickoff call.
"My brigades can cook anything. What they can't do is cook from a menu written in an office."Teodor, Fleet Executive Chef. Galley walk on Aurora.
"We spend $67 million a year on food and we weigh none of what comes back."Priya, CFO. RFP section 5.
That's how much food comes back to the scullery per guest, every night, unserved or half eaten. We weighed it ourselves across two Aurora sailings in September.
Seven nights out of Barcelona, plotted. Drag the ship or pick a night. The layers show what each course needs loaded and what comes back on the plates.
Today 12 percent of Aurora's fresh food is bought along the way. The rest sails from Barcelona and waits in the chill store. Slide the share up and watch the hold change.
2,960 covers between 17:30 and 22:30, with nothing fresh aboard since Palma. Scroll to run the service.
17:30. Doors open. Every station starts from a par sheet built on the last two nights of weigh data, so the galley cooks to a number.
18:30. The first wave. Grill and fish carry the room while pastry proves tomorrow's bread.
19:00. The peak, 410 covers in ten minutes. Tickets leave the pass in the order the room fills, and nothing gets cooked ahead on a guess.
20:40. The second wave runs smaller and later. Unplated mise is logged and moved to tomorrow's crew mess lunch.
22:30. Close. Every station's bin goes on the scale. 0.62 kg per guest tonight, against 1.08 on this night last season.
Thirty-six months from the first galley survey to the day your brigades run the programme without us.
We walk all four galleys, sign growers in six ports and write the recipe library with your sous chefs.
First sailing on the new programme out of Barcelona, with two Galley chefs aboard for six months.
Each ship gets three weeks of galley drills in port before her first guests.
Her blast chiller is replaced in the yard, then she joins the fleet menus.
Menu sign-off moves to each ship's executive chef, one ship at a time.
One review a quarter and a phone line. The weigh data keeps reporting to Priya's team.
Recipe library, par sheets and port contracts, all already in Northstar's name.
The fee stops. The savings and the recipes don't.
Each of you asked us one question. Here's each answer, with a tool to check it yourself.
Helena, Chief Hotel Officer
They'll talk about the dinner that tasted like the day. And your back-to-back guests stop meeting the same plate twice.
Pick how long a guest stays aboard. Each square is one dish on their dinner menus, twelve a night. Magenta means they've had it before.
The port course repeats when the port does. We'd rather a guest had Naples' pasta twice than a Naples dish served off Livorno.
Marcus, VP Food and Beverage
Today it's $19.40, and $3.49 of that goes in the bin. Here's the same day with weigh stations and port buying in, itemised the way your purser would print it.
Teodor, Fleet Executive Chef
Priya, CFO
Savings come from three places you can audit. Waste weighed per station, port contracts in Northstar's name, and Chart Room covers on the ships that have one.
Every line can come off on its own, and each one says what changes when it goes. The total and the payment schedule redraw as you choose.
What we don't know yet, said plainly, with what we'd do about each.
When does Vega leave dry dock?
We've priced a February 2028 launch. If the yard moves, Vega moves with it and her invoices slide too. No change to her price.
Who supplies Ajaccio in winter?
Two of the three growers we've met close from November to March. We may run night six on a Marseille fallback for those months. We'll confirm by February.
Will the crew welfare committee sign off on mess reuse?
Moving unplated mise to crew lunches needs their agreement. Without it, waste falls closer to 28 percent than 35. We'd like to meet them in December.
Does the 2028 itinerary change?
If the Western Mediterranean loop drops a port, that night's course is rewritten. Four rewrites are included. More would be quoted first.
Four signatures and a reply. We'll book the galley surveys the same week and have chefs aboard Aurora in January.