You Can Enjoy Cristal Champagne and Eat Caviar From a Surfboard on This Luxury Ship

Knife in hand, I stared intently at the carrots, peas, and peppers assembled on my cutting board. I was with a group of Brits, Aussies, and Americans in the kitchen of Heaven’s Way restaurant in the small village of Alma, Morocco, having arrived in the nearby port of Agadir that morning on board the Seabourn Ovation. In this class, local women were teaching us how to make tagine. After picking up ingredients at a nearby street market, we followed our instructors’ directions, cutting each vegetable differently — zucchini into coins and potatoes into wedges — to best mound over chicken. As we passed around seasonings like nutty argan oil, ground ginger, and harissa, I caught a whiff of the fragrant ras el hanout, in which 35 freshly ground spices mingled, and grabbed a giant pinch. Then, while our individual tagines simmered over burners, we toured the organic garden — alive with beehives, vegetables, and herbs — below the restaurant and shopped next door at Elexir d’Argane, sampling local goods like bittersweet euphorbia honey, made from nectar that bees gathered from local cacti.

Alma was just the first stop on a 12-day round-trip Lisbon cruise visiting Morocco and the Canary Islands, and I soon learned that the trip teems with culinary adventures, on board and off. The tagine feast set the tone for the remainder of the cruise, and I left any restraint on the embarkation gangway. Seabourn Ovation chefs make everything from scratch, including almond croissants as good as any I’ve had in France, chicken consommé that’s clarified until it shimmers, and apple sorbet that tastes like pure, ripe autumn fruit.

Related: 10 Top Cruises for Food and Drinks, According to the Experts

Beginning in January 2024, the cruise line rolled out a new restaurant concept, Solis, on four of its ships; it launched on Seabourn Ovation in March. Solis generates excitement with an ambitious Mediterranean-wide menu. One must-order dish is the whole chicken for two, which is baked in a cocotte that’s wrapped and sealed with bread dough to trap all the steam. When the server cracked it open tableside, I swear the concentrated chicken essence wafted a good eight feet across the room. The same went for the giant bistecca alla Fiorentina, dripping juices, its beefy aroma making heads swivel at the surrounding tables.

The ship also hosts culinary events, like four-course sommelier-led lunches — midday extravaganzas where I began with a J. Lassalle Champagne paired with a silken chicken-liver parfait, and finished with a 2019 Château Suduiraut Sauternes Premier Cru Classé and brandy-flavored Camembert mousse. Some participants ran to the gym post-indulgence; I opted for an equally delicious nap in my suite. At an Earth and Ocean dinner — a five-course meal in the exclusive Deck 12 Retreat — I sipped Cristal Rosé, its elegance equaled by paper-thin, gin-cured salmon in Champagne vinaigrette, as well as Opus One, the wine’s richness matching that of beef tenderloin and braised oxtail in thyme and truffle jus.

Related: This Gorgeous Hotel in Marrakech Wants to Teach You How to Cook During Your Vacation in Morocco

In Tangier, I joined another cooking excursion to Blue Door Cuisine. I sat on a low sofa as our teachers, Zainab and Houda, demonstrated the intricate process of brewing Moroccan tea. Then we got to work making khobz, Moroccan flatbread. We took turns pounding and kneading the dough, though I was no champ — our instructor, Hanan, insisted I pound harder. I walked my loaf to a nearby communal bakery with its smoke-stained walls and passed it through a small window to a baker minding a wood-fired oven a few feet underground. Soon, I was tearing into piping-hot bread, relishing its warmth while scooping up homemade goat cheese, briny olives, and sweet fig preserves.

More delights unfolded on the final day on board, when the ship hosted a pool party to celebrate our cruise coming to an end. The executive chef heaped caviar onto blini from a surfboard, and despite nearly two weeks of indulgences, I couldn’t resist. So I didn’t. www.seabourn.com

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