If you’ve ever been on a Boat and Bike Tour, you’ve enjoyed some amazing meals on board. Generally there are three courses and, while you don’t get much choice as to what is served (except if you have dietary restrictions), it’s always excellent food, and beautifully presented as well. After a day of biking and a refreshing shower, you look forward eagerly to finding out what the on-board chef will come up with next.
At the same time, if you’ve taken the time to think about it and perhaps to peek into the ship’s kitchen, it may have struck you what a wonder it is that the food is so consistently good. How does the chef manage so much out of such a small kitchen?
One of our copywriters, Rachel, recently took the Bruges to Amsterdam tour. She sat down with the chef, Steven Grimmelt, when he had a free moment on the Magnifique II, to ask him about being an on-board chef:
How did you become a chef?
Steven wanted to be an inventor as a young man and started a job as a machinist, working on a lathe. He soon realized he didn’t like that work and got a job in a restaurant, which he liked much better. That led him to training to be a chef. Since his training was completed, he’s worked in restaurants as sous-chef and head chef – including in a vegetarian restaurant – and as a pâtissier as well.
Do you want to own your own restaurant someday?
Altogether he’s been a chef for 20 years, so why not open his own restaurant? Steven shakes his head. He gets bored easily, he says, which is why he’s never tried to open a restaurant on his own. He doesn’t like the idea of doing the same work for so long. He likes variety, which is why he decided to go freelance. Working on the Magnifique ships as a freelance chef allows that variety that he craves. Generally he works 1-3 weeks in a row on a ship, then works in restaurants and party catering sometimes too.
What do you do in the off-season?
“I try not to work in the winter,” he says with a smile. While their home is in Utrecht, he and his wife both work away from home a lot, so they spend the winters together, traveling.
The 2024 season is his first with the Magnifique ships, other than a single trial week subbing for another chef last year.
So what’s it like, working on a ship?
It’s a very intensive job, mostly because the hours are long. As Steven describes it, he starts work at 6 am and doesn’t finish in the evening until about 9 pm. He gets some breaks, of course, and their length depends on how well-prepared he is and what needs to get done before the next meal or the next day. On his weeks on the ship, he adds, there’s really no time for anything else. Each morning, he assembles the breakfast buffet, much of which is just a matter of putting things out on trays or in bowls: yogurt, breads, cold cuts, cheese, etc. But someone has to cook the eggs, make the fruit salad, etc. Steven also often cooks an additional treat like pancakes or waffles too.
While the passengers pack their own lunches from the items on the breakfast buffet (plus packaged sweets and juice boxes), Steven has to get started preparing dinner, consisting of at least three courses, for all the passengers and crew. On this trip on the Magnifique II, there were 32 passengers and 7 crew. Preparing 3 courses for 38 people takes Steven the rest of the day. Remember, he’s doing the work by himself; there’s no sous-chef. Sometimes the sailor or the hosts will lend a hand here and there, but mostly he’s responsible for the entire process from ingredients to plates.
That kitchen is very small!
The kitchen, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed if you’ve taken a Boat Bike Tour, is small, but Steven says that because he’s on his own it’s not too small. The key, in his opinion, is staying organized: finish one job before starting the next. He also points out some things that help him, particularly the way the countertops can be extended to give him more space: very useful for plating the meals.
Steven purposely lets guests come in and see him at work during the trip. “That’s why the first day I invite people to feel they can come into the kitchen to talk to me, because a lot of people are curious.”
So how do you choose what to prepare?
The Magnifique ships – there are four of them – are somewhat unlike the other ships providing these tours: they’re more standardized in terms of style and décor of their ships, but also in terms of their food.
Each week has a set menu – set by one of the other Magnifique chefs – and the ordering is done all at once rather than ship by ship. That means that the same set of ingredients arrives on each ship. Steven can also submit an order, but he might be ordering for another chef if he’s moving to another ship (or another job) the following week. To him, this was the biggest adjustment he had to make when he started working on the ships: getting groceries for a whole week and working from someone else’s plan. The chefs don’t all work in lockstep, though. “If you want to be creative, you can mix it up,” he adds, within the limits of the ingredients you have.
On the Brugge-Amsterdam tour, there’s one night in Antwerpen, where dinner is not served on the boat. Instead, the passengers can go into the city to enjoy some local dishes. The passengers took this to mean that Steven had the day off, but he didn’t. After the day’s ride, a group of passengers were sitting out on the sundeck having a drink when they were surprised to see Steven pull up to the boat on a bike, carrying a large backpack on his back.
Why? He explains that he often does this because he wants the freshest ingredients. Or sometimes some key ingredient is missing from the order. So he shops at the local markets to fill in the gaps or to put his own spin on a meal.
How do you deal with people with different dietary needs?
Vegetarians, people with allergies or on a gluten-free diet can all be accommodated on a Boat Bike Tour – provided they let the company know ahead of time so the chef can prepare. Steven seeks out these guests on the first day of the tour to have a conversation and get a sense of what their dietary needs are. As he prepares each meal, meeting those needs may mean substituting completely different dishes, or it might mean just leaving out a particular ingredient. The hosts, who work as servers during mealtimes, learn the faces very quickly of those receiving alternative dishes. At breakfast, guests who need a gluten-free diet report straight to the kitchen rather than the buffet for their special bread products.
While the captain, sailors and hosts keep everything moving along smoothly – both literally and figuratively – the chef, in a way, is most central to the passengers’ experience. It’s not just about sustenance; it’s about feeling cared for and rewarded after a day’s ride. That, together with the general congeniality of conversation over dinner with fellow passengers, is central to the Boat Bike Tours experience.
How can we help you?
If you would like to receive more information about our trips or need support from our travel experts to help you choose your trip, please feel free to contact us. Write an email to [email protected] or by calling +1 (203) 814-1249.
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