Vegetarian Cruise Dining: What Seven Nights on Ruby Princess Actually Looked Like
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Short answer: Vegetarian cruise dining on Princess Cruises works considerably better than most plant-based travellers expect, and the biggest variable is not the ship, it is the stateroom category. On our seven-night Alaska sailing aboard Ruby Princess, a Reserve Collection mini-suite gave us a dedicated dining area, the same waiter every evening, and a galley that planned our meals ahead rather than improvising at the table, including a full four-course vegetarian dinner every night. Vegetarian food arrived at breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day, a full vegan menu was available at dinner, and the one genuine limitation was the buffet, where you choose from what is already out rather than asking for something made for you.
This is the first article in our luxury cruise cluster, and it is written from one voyage rather than from a press release. Everything below about vegetarian cruise dining describes meals we actually ate. If you are weighing whether a cruise can work for a vegetarian or vegan traveller who is used to the standards set by the world’s best plant-based destinations, this is what the week actually looked like.
What Vegetarian Cruise Dining Actually Means at Sea
Vegetarian cruise dining is the practice of eating a fully meat-free diet aboard a cruise ship, across the main dining room, the buffet, specialty restaurants and room service, using a combination of published plant-based menus, pre-sailing dietary requests and daily conversations with the waiting staff. Unlike a hotel, where you can simply walk out and find another restaurant, a ship is a closed system for days at a time, which is why vegetarian cruise dining depends far more on how the kitchen plans than on how many options appear on any single menu.
That closed-system reality cuts both ways. It means a bad match is genuinely hard to escape. It also means the crew has something no restaurant ashore has: seven consecutive days to learn what you eat. The strength of vegetarian cruise dining, done properly, is continuity.
Three things determine how well it goes:
- Whether the line publishes a real plant-based menu, rather than treating vegetarian food as a side dish with the protein removed
- Whether your fare tier gives you the same service team each night, which is what turns a request into a standing arrangement
- Whether you tell them before you sail, so the provisioning team loads the ingredients in the first place
Get all three right and vegetarian cruise dining stops being a negotiation. That was our experience, and the rest of this article explains exactly how it worked.
The Voyage: Ruby Princess, Vancouver to Alaska
| Detail | Our sailing |
|---|---|
| Ship | Ruby Princess, Princess Cruises |
| Route | Round-trip Vancouver, British Columbia to Alaska |
| Dates | 13 to 20 August 2024, seven nights |
| Stateroom | Reserve Collection Mini-Suite (M1), D503, Deck 9 |
| Stateroom size | Approximately 323 sq ft including balcony |
| Dining plan | Anytime Dining, plus Reserve Collection dining |
| Ports | Icy Strait Point, Haines, Ketchikan |
| Scenic cruising | Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier |
| Sea days | Two |
Ruby Princess entered service in 2008, measures 113,561 gross tons, and carries 3,080 guests with around 1,200 crew across 19 decks, according to the Princess Cruises fact sheet for the ship. She has three main dining rooms, Botticelli, Da Vinci and Michelangelo, plus Sabatini’s Italian Trattoria, Crown Grill, the Horizon Court buffet and 24-hour room service.
That scale matters for vegetarian cruise dining. A 3,080-guest ship has a galley large enough to run a separate plant-based production line, which a 200-guest yacht simply cannot. The trade-off is that you are one of three thousand people, so the system only works if the ship knows who you are.
Planning your own Alaska sailing? Compare July and August 2027 Alaska cruises on Expedia, the same peak-summer window we sailed in.
Why Reserve Collection Changed Our Vegetarian Cruise Dining
This is the finding that surprised us most, and it is the reason this article exists.
Reserve Collection is Princess’s premium mini-suite category, and it is the current name for what the line previously called Club Class. The stateroom itself is pleasant enough, but the dining benefit is the part that reshapes vegetarian cruise dining. Princess describes Reserve Collection Dining as an exclusive dining area with expedited seating, no wait and no reservations required, a private entrance, dedicated wait staff and additional menu options.
Read that list again with a dietary requirement in mind. “Dedicated wait staff” is the line that matters. It means you are not explaining yourself to a new server every evening.
In practice, our server learned our requirements on the first night and then simply took care of them for the rest of the week. He knew what we ate. He knew what we did not. He would tell us what the galley could do before we asked, and on several evenings he brought dishes that were not printed on that night’s menu because the kitchen had prepared them for us specifically. Vegetarian cruise dining stopped being something we managed and became something that was managed for us.
There is one scheduling detail worth knowing before you book. Princess states that Reserve Collection Dining is available for dinner each night, and for breakfast and lunch on sea days. On our itinerary that meant two sea days of the full Reserve experience at all three meals, with port-day breakfasts and lunches handled elsewhere on the ship. The chef still looked after us at every meal, but the dedicated Reserve room is a dinner-first benefit, and planning around that is the single most useful piece of advance knowledge for anyone weighing the upgrade for dietary reasons.
Best for: Anyone who enjoys a proper sit-down dinner with a dedicated server and real attention to detail, and above all vegetarian and vegan travellers, who get their vegetarian cruise dining settled once on the first night rather than renegotiated at every service.
Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner: Vegetarian Cruise Dining Day by Day
We were served vegetarian food every day of the sailing, at all three meals. That is the plain summary, and it is worth stating flatly because so much cruise coverage hedges on this point.
The pattern that emerged looked like this:
Breakfast. The widest availability of the day, and the meal where vegetarian cruise dining requires the least effort on any ship. Between the dining room and the buffet there is enough fruit, bread, eggs for vegetarians who eat them, porridge and pastry that nobody needs to plan. The one frustration was coffee. If you like a specific drink made to order, a cappuccino in our case, the busy buffet made it a challenge to find a server free to handle it, even with the drink package.
Lunch. The most variable meal, largely because of where you are. On sea days, the Reserve dining room is open and the kitchen is in full control of what reaches your table. On port days you are often ashore, or eating from the buffet, and that is where the ceiling on vegetarian cruise dining drops.
Dinner. The best meal of the day by a clear margin, and the one that justified the Reserve Collection upgrade on its own. This is where the galley’s advance planning showed, and where the range of vegetarian cruise dining on Princess genuinely impressed us. Every dinner was a planned four-course meal, and that held for vegetarians and vegans exactly as it did for everyone else at the table.
The chef made a visible effort to vary things rather than cycling the same three dishes. Over seven nights that is the real test, and it is where most vegetarian cruise dining falls down: not on day one, when everyone is attentive, but on day five, when the novelty of the request has worn off. It did not happen to us.
The Vegan Menu: Princess Went Fleetwide in 2023
One of the more useful things we discovered is that our experience was not improvisation. It was policy.
On 2 October 2023, Princess Cruises introduced seven rotating vegan menus across its fleet, covering starters, salads, soups, pastas and main courses in the main dining rooms of 15 ships. Published dishes on those menus include black beans on toast with tomato and avocado, stir-fried portobellos with soy-maple sauce, plant-based shepherd’s pie and walkaway ratatouille.
Sami Kohen, Princess Cruises’ Vice President of Food and Beverage, framed the launch this way: “Our dedication to delivering unforgettable culinary experiences continues to evolve with current trends, including the desire for more vegan offerings.”
That programme was ten months old by the time we sailed, which explains what we found: a vegan menu available at dinner as a standing offer rather than a favour. For vegetarian cruise dining specifically, the vegan menu is useful even if you are not vegan, because it guarantees a baseline of fully plant-based dishes that exists independently of whatever the kitchen improvises for you.
The important caveat, stated in Princess’s own announcement, is that the vegan menus apply to the main dining rooms. They are not a buffet programme and they are not a specialty restaurant programme. That distinction predicts almost exactly where vegetarian cruise dining on Princess is strong and where it is merely adequate.
Where Vegetarian Cruise Dining Hits Its Limit: The Buffet
Here is the honest part.
The Horizon Court buffet was good. The food was well made, there was plenty of it, and we ate there without complaint. But the buffet is a fundamentally different proposition from the dining room, and any realistic account of vegetarian cruise dining has to say so.
At the buffet you pick and choose from what has already been cooked for three thousand people. There is no customisation. You cannot ask for a dish to be adjusted, you cannot ask for something to be made without an ingredient, and nobody is planning around your requirements because the buffet is catering to the crowd, not to you. The vegetarian options are there, and they are perfectly decent, but they are the options that exist, not the options you asked for.
That is the structural difference, and it is worth being clear about it because it is the difference the Reserve Collection upgrade actually buys. In the dining room you can ask them to build around your dietary restriction, and they go well beyond the minimum to do it. At the buffet you are a guest at a very large shared table.
Practical consequence for anyone planning vegetarian cruise dining on a port-heavy itinerary: the more port days you have, the more meals fall to the buffet, and the more the dining-room advantage is diluted. Our Alaska sailing had three port days and a scenic cruising morning, which is a fairly typical balance.
Best for: Travellers who are comfortable eating well from a limited set rather than requiring every meal to be tailored.
Room Service and OceanNow
Room service was consistently good, and on a cruise it is a quietly important part of vegetarian cruise dining because it fills the gaps the dining room schedule leaves.
Princess runs 24-hour room service, and the MedallionClass system extends it further: through OceanNow you can order food and drinks for delivery anywhere on the ship, not only to the stateroom. On a cold Alaska morning heading into Endicott Arm, being able to have something brought to you on the balcony rather than queuing at the buffet is a genuine benefit rather than a brochure line.
The same caveat as the buffet applies, though. Room service is a fixed menu. It is reliable, it is fast, and for vegetarian cruise dining it is a useful safety net, but it is not a kitchen working to your brief.
Specialty Dining: Sabatini’s
We tried one specialty restaurant, Sabatini’s Italian Trattoria, and it handled vegetarian cruise dining well.
Some dishes on the Sabatini’s menu are already vegetarian, and for others the kitchen adjusted the preparation so we could eat them. That is the right answer from a specialty restaurant: not a separate plant-based menu, but a willingness to work with what they already cook. Italian menus have a natural advantage here, since a significant share of the repertoire is vegetable and pasta based to begin with.
A booking note that is easy to miss: Reserve Collection guests get priority specialty dining reservations. If you want to sit down with the specialty restaurant team and discuss what they can do for you, having first pick of the reservation slots is more useful than it sounds, because the conversation goes better at a quiet early booking than at a full 8pm service.
We did not try Crown Grill. As a steakhouse it is the venue where vegetarian cruise dining would face its hardest test on this ship, and we cannot tell you how it performs.
How to Request Vegetarian Cruise Dining Before You Sail
The provisioning matters more than the menu. A ship cannot cook what it did not load in Vancouver.
Princess states that guests can request vegan and vegetarian options before cruising through Manage Booking, through a travel agent, or by phone, and can also make the request onboard. Do it before you sail. Here is the sequence we would recommend for any line, not only Princess:
- Flag it at booking. Put the dietary requirement on the reservation the day you book, not the week you sail. This is what reaches the provisioning team.
- Confirm it in Manage Booking or Cruise Personalizer. Requests entered by a travel agent do not always carry through cleanly. Check it yourself.
- Speak to the maitre d’ on embarkation day. This is the single highest-value fifteen minutes of the trip for vegetarian cruise dining. Before the first dinner service, find the dining room manager and have the conversation in person.
- Tell your waiter what you eat, not just what you avoid. “No meat, no fish” tells a kitchen what to subtract. “We love pulses, south Indian flavours, anything with aubergine” tells them what to build.
- Ask each evening about tomorrow. In the Reserve dining room our server pre-empted this, but on any ship, ordering a day ahead is how you get a dish made for you rather than a dish left over.
Step three is the one most travellers skip, and it is the one that changes the week. If you want the full planning framework we use for any trip, our step-by-step guide to planning a luxury vegetarian trip covers the pre-arrival communication templates in more detail.
Vegetarian Cruise Dining Compared: How the Major Lines Stack Up
Princess is not the only line with a serious plant-based programme, and for a pillar article it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The table below summarises what each line publishes, drawing on Cruise Critic’s survey of the best cruises for vegetarians and vegans alongside the lines’ own announcements.
| Cruise line | What they publish | Notes for vegetarian cruise dining |
|---|---|---|
| Oceania Cruises | More than 250 vegan dishes, launched April 2017, plus a vegan juice bar on Marina and Riviera | The most extensive published plant-based programme at sea. Confirmed on Oceania’s own announcement |
| Princess Cruises | Seven rotating vegan menus, launched October 2023, main dining rooms fleetwide | Four-course vegetarian and vegan dinners every night on our sailing. Strongest when paired with Reserve Collection dining |
| Celebrity Cruises | Fourteen days of vegetarian menu variations, with vegetarian, vegan and lactose-free items marked by icon | Best for longer itineraries where menu repetition becomes an issue |
| Royal Caribbean | A seven-day rotation vegan menu in the main dining room, fleetwide | Broad availability across a very large fleet |
| Holland America Line | A 22-dish vegetarian and vegan main dining room menu, plus an Indian vegetarian menu ordered 24 hours ahead | The Indian vegetarian menu is a meaningful differentiator |
| Azamara | A daily vegan dinner menu in the main dining room and specialty venues | Notable for extending plant-based menus into specialty dining |
| SeaDream Yacht Club | A complete plant-based organic vegan meal nightly, four courses | Small-ship service, highest per-guest attention |
The honest ranking for pure menu breadth puts Oceania first. The honest ranking for what we actually experienced puts Princess with Reserve Collection very close behind, because a good menu you have to chase is worth less than a decent menu that arrives without being asked for.
If you are choosing between a cruise and a land-based trip, it is worth comparing this against what the best luxury hotels for vegetarian travellers offer, and against the seasonality mapped out in our luxury vegetarian travel by month calendar.
What We Would Do Differently
Three things, none of them complaints.
Book Reserve Collection specifically for the dining, not the stateroom. We booked it for the mini-suite and the balcony. The vegetarian cruise dining benefit turned out to be the part that mattered, and we would now treat it as the primary reason rather than a bonus.
Try more than one specialty restaurant. We only tested Sabatini’s. Having seen how willing that kitchen was, we suspect the others would have handled vegetarian cruise dining better than we assumed, and we left that unexplored.
Plan port-day lunches deliberately. The buffet is fine, but three port days is three lunches where the dining-room advantage does not apply. On a repeat sailing we would decide in advance which of those we would eat ashore.
Is Princess Worth It for Vegetarian Cruise Dining?
Yes, and with the Reserve Collection upgrade, emphatically so.
This was our first cruise, which is worth declaring, because it means we had no baseline to compare against and no accumulated expectations to be disappointed. What we had instead was a straightforward question: can a vegetarian eat well at sea for a week without it becoming the defining logistical problem of the trip? The answer was yes, and it was not close. We would sail Princess again without hesitation.
The verdict in one line: vegetarian cruise dining on Princess is a genuinely good experience in the main dining room, a good-but-limited one at the buffet, and an accommodating one in specialty restaurants, and the Reserve Collection fare tier is what raises the whole week from workable to excellent.
Planning an Alaska cruise?
See summer 2027 Alaska sailings
Compare July and August 2027 departures of three to nine nights, the same window as our Ruby Princess week. When you book, add your vegetarian request to the reservation the same day.
Compare Alaska Cruises on Expedia →
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is cruising a good option for vegetarians?
Yes. Every major cruise line now publishes vegetarian and vegan main dining room menus, and Princess, Oceania, Celebrity, Royal Caribbean and Holland America all run standing plant-based programmes. The determining factor in vegetarian cruise dining is not the line but whether you notify the ship at booking and speak to the maitre d’ on embarkation day.
Does Princess Cruises have a vegan menu?
Yes. Princess introduced seven rotating vegan menus fleetwide on 2 October 2023, covering starters, salads, soups, pastas and main courses in the main dining rooms across 15 ships. The vegan menus are a main dining room programme and do not extend to the buffet or specialty restaurants.
What is Reserve Collection on Princess Cruises?
Reserve Collection is Princess’s premium mini-suite category, formerly called Club Class. It includes an exclusive dining area with a private entrance, no reservations required, dedicated wait staff, additional menu options, priority embarkation and priority specialty dining reservations. For vegetarian cruise dining, the dedicated wait staff is the benefit that matters most.
Can you get vegetarian food at the cruise buffet?
Yes, but without customisation. Cruise buffets are cooked in bulk for the whole ship, so you select from what is already available rather than asking for a dish to be adapted. The vegetarian options are reliable and well made, but the buffet is the one venue where vegetarian cruise dining cannot be tailored to you.
How far in advance should you request a vegetarian meal on a cruise?
Request vegetarian cruise dining at the time of booking, not in the final weeks. The dietary note on your reservation is what reaches the provisioning team that loads the ship, so an early request affects what ingredients are actually onboard. Confirm it yourself in Manage Booking or Cruise Personalizer rather than assuming a travel agent’s entry carried through.
Which cruise line is best for vegan and vegetarian travellers?
Oceania Cruises publishes the most extensive programme, with more than 250 vegan dishes across its fleet since April 2017. Princess Cruises is the strongest value alternative when booked with a Reserve Collection fare, because the dedicated dining team delivers consistency that a larger printed menu does not guarantee.
Final Thoughts
The lesson we took off Ruby Princess was not about a menu. It was about continuity.
A restaurant ashore meets you once. On a Reserve Collection fare, the same dining team meets you every evening of the week, plus breakfast and lunch on sea days, and if the structure is right, they use that. Vegetarian cruise dining succeeds or fails on whether the ship is set up to remember you, which is why a fare tier that assigns you the same people every evening does more for a plant-based traveller than an extra dozen dishes on a card.
Book the dietary request early, find the maitre d’ before the first dinner, and choose a fare that gives you the same table and the same team. Those three moves decide your vegetarian cruise dining far more than the ship does. Do that and the food stops being the thing you worry about, which is the entire point of going.
For the wider picture of where plant-based travel is worth your time, start with our ultimate guide to luxury vegetarian travel destinations or explore the world’s best vegetarian fine dining restaurants.
Written by VelvetVerde Editorial. This account is based on a seven-night Princess Cruises sailing aboard Ruby Princess from Vancouver to Alaska, 13 to 20 August 2024, in a Reserve Collection Mini-Suite. We paid for our own passage. Cruise line menus and programmes change, so confirm current offerings with the line before booking.
