I Love Food

I’m going to try to be positive and proactive and all that in this post. So I’ll zero in on something that can make or wreck a cruise for me. Food. And I love food.

All you restaurateurs out there, I have these layman’s questions & suggestions:
Please make the food conveniently available to the cruisers. Coupons and such are nice but I go to cruises mostly to see cars and their people. If I have to go in to your nice building I’m not seeing them any more and I won’t know which cars belong to which people; I won’t be able to swap ideas or swap stories with them.
Could you have the wait-staff circulate around the cruisers to take orders? Maybe even bring the food out to the cars? That would be reminiscent of “curb service”, an American automotive innovation of yesteryear.
Can you do something to make sure the cruisers don’t have to wait an excessive length of time to get their food? Please staff up for the expected crowd you are anxious to attract with the cruise. Don’t short the kitchen staff either. We can see that the folks bringing the food look dog tired by 7:30 when you are short handed. Also, we can tell if the kitchen is slow and the dining area workers are trying to hide from us because they don’t have our food order.
How about a limited menu? On cruise nights by-pass the lamb chops and other fancy labor-intensive dishes. Could you bill it as “High Speed Specials” or “Power Pack Picks” to carry through on the fast service and car culture concepts?
Maybe you could have a serving station complete with register accessible from outside by the cars? Offer a basic menu there; have beverages and sandwiches/burgers/dogs/salads that are related to your central dining theme. Cruisers could order, pick-up, and pay there.
Entertainment/DJ? Keep it by the cars. You want us to bring our cars then you bring us the entertainment; that sounds like a fair deal to me.
Got a deck? Then that should be the central location for entertainment and food.