Cruising Alaska

The wife and I just got back from an amazing week long cruise of southeast Alaska. If you haven't visited Alaska, I can't recommend going highly enough. And while a cruise is admittedly silly and touristy it was a great way to see such a massive state (much of which is seemingly inaccessible by car anyway).

Food wasn't the focus of our trip, but just in case anyone does a similar itinerary I thought I would post a few thoughts.

We were on Celebrity's Millennium. On most days we would have a light breakfast from the the buffet (which was perfectly respectable), lunch would be somewhere in port, and then we'd have dinner in the ship's main dining room. One day at sea they put on a brunch in the main dining room that was pretty ordinary with the exception of 3 different kinds of gravlax. They did lemon/dill, sesame, and blueberry. All were outstanding and were probably the best things we ate on board all week. Dinners were basically the equivalent of high-end wedding food. Nothing terrible, but nothing really spectacular either. We had dinner one night in the fancy "specialty" restaurant. Again, good but not great.

Lunches were as follows:

Juneau - Tracy's King Crab Shack, right next to the Juneau library.



You can get king crab, dungeness crab, crab bisque, and that's pretty much it. Insanely good crab (as one would expect). There was also a crepe stand located right by Tracy's that had just about the best crepes I've ever had. Non-foodwise the highlight of our entire trip was probably taking a helicopter ride to a glacier and then landing on the glacier. I can't recommend doing this highly enough. Plus you wind up with cool pictures, like this one:



Skagway - Nothing here looked too intriguing so we picked up some smoked salmon to eat while riding the White Pass Railroad. The salmon shop in town sells several varieties as well as strips of smoked sockeye belly (insanely great stuff). We shipped a box home to ourselves.

Icy Strait Point - Icy Strait is located about a mile down the road from the small native fishing village of Hoonah (population 800). The two places that most people talk about for lunch here are the Crab Station (located right on the dock) and The Office (located about 3/4 of the way from Icy Strait to Hoonah). We did a whale watch here and when we were done we grabbed a bite from a restaurant actually in town, The Chipper Fish. We had salmon bites and a salmon taco, and both were pretty great. The bites were good sized chunks of salmon lightly breaded with panko and fried. The taco was a massive tortilla filled with salmon, jalapenos, beans, sour cream, cherry tomatoes, and probably some other stuff that I'm forgetting.

Ketchikan - There were a couple of fish & chips places on the dock but our float plane pilot from our excursion that day recommended the Alaska Fish House.



I had a halibut burger and the wife had a salmon burger. When they say "burger" in Alaska it usually means you're getting a nice sized grilled fish filet on a bun and these were no exception. The fish for our "burgers" were cooked better than most of the fish I've had here in Chicago.

If anyone has any questions about excursions or anything else we did feel free to send a PM.

PS - There also seemed to be a lot of strange combinations going on...