Anytime we go on vacation, one of the most important things to consider is food. Whether you’re at a theme park or on a cruise ship, you have a certain expectation when it comes to the food. When you’re on the Star Wars: Galactic Strarcruiser, which is equal parts theme park and cruise ship, and also 100% Star Wars, you want to have a dining experience that feels like it came from a galaxy far, far away. And the Disney World Food & Beverage team worked hard to give guests that, though it took a long time, as one specific dish actually took the culinary experts six months to figure out how to make.
On the second night of your stay on board the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, you’ll be treated to a dining experience called Tastes Around The Galaxy. As part of this experience, the ship’s chef will come out to take guests through the various items, all from different planets in the Star Wars universe. One of these items is the Iced Blue Felucian shrimp. I spoke with Walt Disney World Culinary Director Brian Piasecki, and he explained that figuring out just how to turn the shrimp blue, in a way that made it look alien, but didn’t make it taste unusual, was a very long process. Piasecki said…
In its core, it’s a shrimp cocktail, but the shrimp is brined in butterfly pea tea so it turns the shrimp this shade of blue. It took about 6 months to get right. And it actually permeates through the flesh of the shrimp so when you cut into it or bite into it, the entire shrimp is blue throughout. But it transfers zero flavor. So it tastes like shrimp cocktail. If you were to eat it with your eyes closed it would be a shrimp cocktail.
While the culinary team needed to figure out how to make food look exotic and otherworldly, Chef Piasecki said that it still needed to be familiar enough for guests. Disney World has done plenty of food with a science fiction theme, Epcot has the new Space 220 restaurant, but that food still looks like it is from earth. Star Wars is different. However, if things were taken too far, people wouldn’t want to actually eat it. In this case, the dish still needed to be a shrimp cocktail, even though it looked like something quite different.
While I personally have not tried the blue shrimp, I did get to try a tasting of the first night’s dinner service (seen in the image above), during a recent visit to Galactic Starcruiser, and found everything to be quite delicious. The food is all quite creative while also being really good. If the Galactic Starcruiser were an actual cruise ship, people would expect a certain level of quality, and considering how much people are paying to visit Galactic Starcruiser, they certainly want their money’s worth.
One of the most amazing things about theme parks is how seamless and detailed everything appears. It all fits together so well that it’s easy to forget that people had to work to make sure that it all looked so effortless. But the effort is certainly there when chefs are taking six months to find just the right way to change a shrimp’s color. The culinary team at Walt Disney World has done some really impressive work on the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser
