Gluten & diary free vegan on carnival vista?

Hello hello,

We cruise in 9 months on carnival vista. Wondering if anyone has information

(email etc) on who to contact regarding gluten and dairy free on Carnival Vista. I’ve read there is GF bread and pizza crusts but I’m not sure about diary free vegan cheese, etc. any info or tips will help! I want our kids to have fun and enjoy cruise eating. Thank you.

You have plenty of time to contact Special Needs and give them your dietary preferences.

It will be listed on your cruise information and you will most likely meet with a dining room hostess or wait captain and discuss MDR menus daily.

Carnival bends over backward to assist all types of dietary restrictions and practices.

No need to panic.

No worries! We are about to cruise on our fifth sailing with Carnival coming up in November on the Vista. Wifey has gluten intolerance and she's been very well cared for by the crew. Near the end of the meal each night, they bring her a menu for the following night so she places the order in advance. They even have Carnival Melting Chocolate Cake gluten free. Yay!

She gets bunless burgers from Guy's Burger Joint and especially likes Guy's Pig and Anchor BBQ. Yum from both of us! She also checks with the crew captains in each area of the Lido buffet.

Be sure to do the brunch in the MDR on sea days!

With just a little communication with the crew, you will eat well and have a great time.

I cannot comment on the gluten free selection but we are vegan and have cruised both Royal and Carnival. If you search the boards here for Carnival vegan you will come up with some helpful threads.

As far as personal experience we have had mixed results on both lines. Neither offer any kind of vegan cheese (ok for us as we don't like it anyway) and you will most likely have to request almond or soy milk as it is not regularly put out as an option. We have not found a dairy free butter alternative on either line (generally use peanut butter at breakfast instead).

We have eaten in the buffet and also in the main dining room. The head chefs in the buffet are the most helpful with pointing you towards vegan options. If you ask one of the line servers you may just receive a blank stare. ;)

We have had some issues with the main dining room. The food itself is always very good and they will go out of their way to make sure you have plenty to eat! That said, they generally come around near the end of dinner with the next nights menu. They will give you options of things that can be adjusted or sometimes they will offer to make you something off menu (95% of the time that will be an Indian food selection). This means you will need to be able to decide what you want to eat the day before and makes it difficult/rude just to skip dinner in the dining room and go to the buffet. If you do let them know you will not be at dinner the next night you will need to make arrangements to meet with the maitre d during the next day (lunch generally) to pick your dinner for the following night. We have also always done Any Time or My Time dining and that does seem to confuse the wait staff. We have had lost dinner requests and on our last cruise they would take our order each night but not replace the old one so by the 3rd night we actually ended up with all 3 dinner orders placed! I didn't want to be rude so we ate as much as we could and felt enormously sick for the rest of the evening. :p We are trying Carnival again in December and have opted for a set dining time to hopefully avoid some of the confusion.

Most of the sepcialty restaurants don't have enough options to make them worth the cost for us. We have had good luck with some of the free extra venues. Blue Iguana, Guys Burgers (not on the menu but they do have a veggie burger if you ask), Johnny Rockets on Royal (not free but cheap), Pizza Pirate's crust is vegan and they can do a pizza for you with no cheese and veggies. We will be on the Breeze in December and have read that Cucina Del Capitano (free at lunch) has a build your own pasta bar with options and the indian restaurant Tandoor also has some options.

We are also planning to take a bottle of vegan ranch with us this time as the only real option for salad dressing is vinegar based (fine for me but not so much for DH. :) )

I have sailed twice with Carnival since being diagnosed with Celiac. On both ships, the Sunshine and the Horizon, everyone was amazing! As someone stated earlier, I ordered my dinner the night before, and the chefs would modify the ingredients to make it GF. Zero issues! They even made me a GF soufflé one night! I wanted to personally thank the chef, but he was too busy to come out. I don’t know if the Vista has the Pig & Anchor bar, but if they do, there are GF options there too. Although, if you want vegan and GF, a BBQ place may not be the best option!

Before I sailed, I called guest services and they noted on my reservation that I needed GF. Didn’t really need to do much else besides talk to my waiter the first night. You may want to go with a set time dining instead of any time so you have the same servers who will remember what you need.

Hope everyone has a great cruise!

I've always been diary free on all of my cruises but you've given me food for thought. I may have to discover my inner writer.

My last cruise was on the Magic Sep 2017. My friend is gluten free and I am dairy free. On embarkation we went to the main dining room to the maitre d station. They have people there to deal with all your dining needs for the first night. We explained about our allergies and the provided the nights menu so we could 'preorder' that nights dinner in the MDR. From then on our waiters would bring the next nights menu before the end of dinner so we could preorder.

I was disappointed with the lack of dairy free desserts. But overall it was very good system for dinner.

I am not a big buffet person since developing this allergy[emoji13]. But the head buffet person is supposed to be able to direct you to the appropriate choices for your allergy.

For breakfast I usually did the omelette station.

Lunch was usually the Mongolian Wok.

We did eat at Cucina del Capitano one night. We went up earlier in the day to explain our allergies and preorder our food once again.

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Thank you all for your information! I haven’t been able to reach anyone that knows anything about the dairy free options but I have one more number to try to call. Looks like I will have to bring some DF cheese and chocolate chips and give the kitchen some baking options. I’m sure it will be a great time!