Caviar on boiled eggs cooked by Alain Ducasse at sea? Anna Moloney jumps on board Ponant’s luxury cruise Le Commandant Charcot for a winter tour
When the Captain beamed over the tannoy that special guest Jacques Nebot would now be available in the main lounge to sign copies of ‘Caviar by Kaviari’ – a three-inch, hardback tome tracking the ‘fascinating’ history of caviar – I almost wept. Poor Jacques, I thought. Who would turn up to that?
Thirty minutes later, on board the one-of-a-kind La Commandant Charcot, I found myself weaving through hordes of book-clutching septagenarians, who absolutely would be paying for extra luggage allowance to get their signed caviar coffee table books home for Christmas.
Indeed, if you didn’t like caviar, you were going to be in trouble on this trip, with everything from steak to lemon confit garnished with the costly beads; one night, instead of a chocolate, it was even a tin of caviar I found left on my pillow for a nighttime snack. When one morning, in a futile cry for restraint, I ordered boiled eggs for breakfast, it was I who was left looking foolish when surprised at the follow-up question – “with caviar on top?”
Welcome to a luxury cruise run by the French, or more specifically by Ponant.
A luxury cruise with a French spirit
Headquartered in Marseille, Ponant is a premium cruise operator with a reputation for refinement. On board their ships, almost all of which boast a 1:1 crew-to-guest ratio, you will find few needs that go unmet – and perhaps even develop a few you never knew you had (heated benches, singular macarons served under cloches, that kind of thing). With whimsical missives left in your cabin’s postbox to remind you to ‘please remember to turn back your clocks tonight’, bothering yourself with basic thinking is practically prohibited. “You’ve gone past your cabin,” a member of the housekeeping team called after me one day as I bumbled lost in the labyrinthine corridors. It seems I had become a little too used to being helped by men in ironed shirts.
I was on board for Ponant’s Scandinavian Christmas cruise, an itinerary which starts from Helsinki and loops the Baltic Sea with stops in Stockholm, Gotland, Gdansk, Riga and Tallinn, before returning to snowy Finland. It’s essentially a whistlestop tour of chocolate box cities to buy baubles in (nothing wrong with that by the way), and really just the backdrop for the only destination that actually matters on this cruise: Le Commandant Charcot.
Tanned woods, spacey fireplaces and ever so tasteful modern art, Le Commandant Charcot embodies the kind of atmosphere Gen Z would rush to call ‘demure’ – tasteful, but anodyne. Members of Gen Z though, as you may imagine, were in rather short supply on this ship, and my boyfriend and I (both in our mid-twenties and conspicuous because of it), were approached multiple times by fellow shipmates asking some variation of the question ‘why are you here?’.
With rooms starting from around £8,000 per person for a 10 day itinerary, the trip comes with a premium price tag that places it within a wider boom in ultra-luxury cruises populated by the likes of Silversea, Crystal, Explora and Aman, all of which have recently launched new stock for Ponant to compete with. With early wake ups, few passengers under 60 and all bars closing around 11, Ponant seems to be trying to distinguish itself with food and refinement rather than adventure.
Roxanne, my 60-something newly befriended Californian shipmate, described Ponant’s look as “very expensive and very straight” – more sedate than her preferred voyages with lesbian cruiseliner Olivia, but a welcome dose of elegance compared to the star-spangled US liners she had previously had the utmost misfortune to sail on. “The Americans just go to eat and drink – it’s disgusting,” she tutted to me as I polished off my lunchtime cheese course. I nodded sagely. Thank God, then, we were amongst the French. In fact, with English the first language of only 20 of the 200 guests on board, we were blissfully outnumbered by them.
The world’s only luxury icebreaker
Launched in 2021, Le Commandant Charcot boasts some pretty special credentials as the world’s first and only luxury icebreaker. It was built especially for polar expeditions and, with Russian nuclear-powered cruises now off limits, is now the only passenger ship that can take you to the North Pole as a Westerner.
From the Charcot-shaped chocolate mousse served at dinner to the build-your-own mini models of the ship which sold out by day six, it was hard not to be swept up in the Le Commandant spirit. Jumping on coaches for panoramic tours of central Stockholm, we were hardly intrepid adventurers ourselves, but marching out in our complimentary ‘POLAR EXPEDITION’-embazoned Ponant parkas (fluorescent orange and fur-trimmed) to browse candy canes and mittens made us feel like we could be.
In Tallinn particularly, where I opted for the adventurous snowshoeing option, the group really proved its collective commitment to the bit, as my 20 or so senior companions and I strapped on our snow shoes to trek across the Estonian bog despite the fact that, thanks to climate change, there was in fact no snow at all. Naturally, nobody was rude enough to mention it, and we happily marched over the snowless marsh together, giant orange boards fastened to our feet.
As with almost all cruises, the stops can feel fleeting. Probably the most memorable stop ended up being Gotland, a Swedish island increasingly being used to bulk out Baltic itineraries now devoid of St Petersburg. We were meant to sail into the fairytale-like Visby (one of the best preserved medieval towns in Europe and a holiday home hotspot for Sweden’s elite) but bad weather meant we were forced to moor in Slite, an industrial town home to northern Europe’s biggest cement factory. Not quite the picturesque arrival Ponant had planned, and the drive across the island certainly gave us insight into a less sugary side of Gotland. Hotels converted to military accommodation and golf ranges turned into shooting ranges, Gotland’s strategic location means it has reason to fear Russian aggression. It may not have been quite the Christmas wonderland branding the cruise is sold on, but it’s fair to say we’d probably seen enough twinkly lights at this point.
Such excursions anyway were merely excuses to run back to the warm embrace of Le Commandant feeling like you’d accomplished something for the day before settling back into gilded comfort. Personally, I ran to the spa whenever I could, where there was an indoor pool, a ‘detox bar’ with a menu that felt straight out of LA, an ocean-view sauna and a snow room (a room just full of snow, that’s correct) all at my disposal. There is also a heated outdoor pool available on the upper deck, I got in shivering day one with my ear muffs and wasn’t too upset when it was shut for the rest of the trip (not only do you have to bear the sub-zero temperatures to get in, but also the self-consciousness of walking through the restaurant in your swimming togs, which is the only route to the pool).
Holidaying with Alain Ducasse
Food, as mentioned, is also a major part of the experience. Not only is Le Commandant Charcot the only ship in the world with an Alain Ducasse restaurant on board, but, for my particular itinerary, Alain Ducasse himself too, there as a guest speaker and chef.
On board with his family among only 200 other guests (caviar-chomping Parisians for that matter), having the second most Michelin-decorated chef on board naturally caused a bit of a stir. Personally, I was amused to watch him day one, forced with the rest of us to attend the mandatory safety briefing, as he sat in the auditorium scrolling through his emails.
When I interviewed him on board, with his teenage son translating for him, Ducasse was loth to consider himself as a celebrity on the ship, describing himself instead as a basic passenger there with a job to do. And to his credit at each stop, while the rest of us were Christmas shopping, Ducasse could be seen scurrying off with his troop of chefs in search of fresh ingredients to feed us for dinner; in Stockholm, when I sat on the last tender back to the ship before departure as the crew looked at their watches, it was Ducasse who ran onto the port last, met with a cheer as he announced he had bought us all fish from the market for dinner.
On board this ship, the menu is dependent on what he finds at each stop, whether it be fish from Stockholm or loganberries in Riga, but everything comes with his signature Michelin-quality refinement that chimes in with the relaxed elegance that characterises the ship. Almost every other night is a gala dinner (complete with a dress code) and both bedtimes and wakeups are timed early, in accordance with the schedule (largely designed to chase daylight at this time of the year) and presumably also the preferred habits of the more senior clientele.
Ducasse tells me his draw to Ponant was fuelled by his love for the challenge of cooking in extreme conditions, and the thrill of adventure: “If I hadn’t been a cook, I would have been a traveller,” he sums up pithily. Having previously designed food and menus for Concorde, the International Space Station and now harbouring ambitions to open the first restaurant on Mars, difficulty is Ducasse’s favourite precondition. Luckily, for the rest of us on board, coming up for air briefly from our troughs of caviar, there was simply none to speak of.