Guests want experiences and knowledge. Chefs want education and options. As the culinary side of yachting changes and evolves, we meet some of the people helping the evolution along.
As Provisions Head of Department at National Marine Suppliers, Joel Christy hears a lot about what owners, guests and chefs want in the galley. They want the highest quality, as they always have, but in recent years there’s been more. Now, more people want to know about the food, its provenance, its story.
The Regenerator
For all of that, learning about regenerative agriculture was a revelation for Christy.
“You don’t till the earth,” Christy says of regenerative agriculture. “When you till the earth, you’re basically just ripping up any nutrients, any minerals — you’re ripping them out of the earth and they’re going into the environment. They’re gone.
“With [regenerative agriculture], the soil will become richer, the soil will grow. If you till, the earth eventually will become sand.”
For regenerative agriculture to work, you also need animals to graze and fertilize. They don’t necessarily need to be animals to sell at market as well, but they can be. One farm Christy deals with now sells turkeys that were originally brought in simply to help the land.
Since starting a regenerative program at National Marine, Christy pitches products from regenerative farms to boats while explaining the benefits. More and more, he says, guests don’t simply want to eat a meal; they want to know about the food they’re eating.
“You have a story,” he says. “Every time they eat something, they want to know the story behind the food on that plate. Every time you use regenerative agriculture, there’s a story.”
But it’s more than a story, he says. It’s excellent, high-quality food.
“If the chef gets something from the garden, it’s harvested the day before the chef gets it,” he says. It tastes great and shelf life can be tenfold. Similar advantages exist for meat and poultry.
“They’re not being mass-slaughtered and trucked all over the country, and being held in freezers,” he says. Again, that benefits both taste and shelf life.
“When there’s so many benefits to it, it’s easy to explain it to the chefs,” Christy says.
He’s now doing that. Regenerative agriculture and yachting are a perfect fit. “If there’s one industry in the world that should be supporting a type of agriculture that is supporting the earth, it’s yachting,” he says. “It has the money to do it.
“Our customers — they want the best. Generally, they’re not concerned with price. They’re very dependent on who’s supplying them with their products. It has to be right every time.”
The Experience Maker
Not long ago, guests on a Superyacht Bar client’s yacht made a stop at a small Italian vineyard. The proprietor cooked tomahawk steaks that paired well with the reds and gave the guests a tour. It was, they said later, the best part of their trip.
“Everybody is looking for unique VIP experiences,” says Rebecca Lee, Superyacht Bar’s chief experience officer. “People are drinking smarter. They’re drinking better quality, and they want to know a little bit more about what they’re drinking. They want that tasting experience. The memorable experience combined with the quality, I think is important.”
At the heart of Superyacht Bar — which includes Superyacht Wine Club, Superyacht Whiskey Club and, new for 2026, Superyacht Champagne Club — sits the business of offering a wide selection of the best wines, whiskeys and other adult beverages to yachts. But Lee shies away from “provisioning” as a descriptor of what Superyacht Bar does, because it goes beyond that.
“We’ll get you what you want,” she says, “but we will also give you that experience.”
Part of the experience is also educational — both for guests and for captains and crew. Superyacht Bar frequently hosts tasting sessions. For charter crew, it’s more than a fun event; it’s an opportunity to learn about the products and be knowledgeable enough to have a whiskey tasting in the back pocket as a potential rainy-day event.
Unique VIP experiences can also extend to the bottles themselves. An option available to members is cask purchase. They go to the distillery and pick the cask, which is then bottled at the facility and labeled for the boat or what the owner wants. The service is available for whiskey or tequila.
For the new champagne club, they’re partnering with Perrier-Jouët, a brand known for superior quality and its art nouveau bottles. They make great gifts and offer another unique part of the experience, Lee says. It’s a personal, knowledgeable, experiential service that goes beyond simply getting drinks onto boats.
“Clubs offer a true partnership between the yacht owner or the yacht manager or the yacht management company to elevate,” she says. “It’s that level of elevation and a personal touch that the clubs bring.”
The Teacher
Chef Adrienne Gang remembers one charter trip where a guest wanted a special dessert for her husband’s birthday — a Cuban sponge cake.
Gang grew up in Tampa and knows Cuban food, but she’d never heard of Cuban sponge cake. So, she started searching around — and found that nobody else had ever heard of it either. Finally, she found one review of one Cuban bakery in LA that did what they called Cuban sponge cake. The bakery had no website; when she called and said she didn’t want to steal their recipe but would like to make it, they laughed and hung up.
She spoke to charter broker who talked to the client; she then spoke directly to the client. Turns out, yes, it was from that one bakery, and it was their wedding cake. Gang presented the options. A) the client spend several thousand more to send her on a quick-turnaround flight to LA to pick up a cake; or B) the client select from one of Gang’s excellent and similar options. The guest went with B.
The lesson Gang took from that? “There are times when it’s OK to say no. You just have to exhaust every solution before that answer, and present other options.”
That’s the kind of lesson Gang tries to impart in the seminar-style classes she teaches through Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.
She says there’s so much training around yachts in general, but chefs are typically expected to take the skills they learned on land and hit the galley running.
“I’ve seen a lot of people who are really accomplished on land, but as soon as they step on a boat they flounder, because they didn’t realize how different this is,” she says.
Her classes are not culinary in the traditional sense. Anybody taking the class should already know their way around a high-end kitchen. Her classes are all about operation.
“Understanding how different our operations are and our confined spaces and the rest of it, that is so important,” she says.
You also have to be comfortable with a level of culinary diversity not every chef is prepared for. Charter chefs frequently deal with new sets of allergies and intolerances, restrictions, cultural preferences and unique requests on a daily basis. Gang recently spoke to one young chef who’s registered for her April class; she told him that before he works on yachts, take a job with a restaurant group that owns diverse restaurants. They’ve got an Italian place, a steakhouse, a sushi joint and more? Perfect.
“Tell whoever is hiring you that you want to work in all of those places, because that is going to make you more valuable,” she says. “There is a pathway for younger people to come into this industry through culinary, but you’ve got to be diverse.”
For Gang, information like this is something needed in an industry that’s done so much for her.
“Doing this class is my giveback to the industry,” she says. “I created a class that I wish had existed when I started.”
The Land-Side Mover
When Kyle Ripple started culinary concierge service Ripples in Motion nearly three years ago, he wasn’t thinking solely about yacht chefs. But with a business dedicated to offering high-end private cheffing — basically, doing on land what yacht chefs do at sea — he had them in mind.
“Being a yacht chef, you have to know how to make anything — any request, any suggestion, being able to take care of it,” he says. “Being able to execute it to a certain standard is important to us.”
The business started small at the north end of the South Florida region but has now spread nationwide and beyond with a network of more than 250 chefs. Not all of them are full-time, and it’s not necessarily a requirement to leave the yachting world to pick up work like this. Freelance or rotational chefs looking for land-side work are also welcome.
“As an agency, we understand that the private chef and the yacht chef most likely have their own client base. We’re just here to be an addition to that,” he says. “Sometimes they’re just looking to be a part of an agency that can guide and support them with resources.”
Those resources include areas like help with websites, resume building, even healthcare.
“We have chefs who are currently happy in full-time roles, but they just want to be in our network,” he says. “There is a ton of great resources that chefs can be a part of.”
They book for everything from full-time private chefs to weddings to smaller one-off events, so there is flexibility and variety in the work.
Yacht chef skills translate well to the land-side private chef world, he says. There’s that ability to create varied menus and make things happen. Chefs with consistent work on one boat or for one owner can also look good.
“That’s something that a lot of our clients look for,” he says. “They don’t want to be looking for a new chef every year.”