I’ve written a few posts about eating on Viking River cruises as a vegan with a husband who has life-threatening food allergies. Our last experience was amazing but recent comments on that post have indicated that things are not as accommodating on the river cruises anymore. I was sort of scared going into our Viking ocean cruise in February 2025. Everything worked out pretty well. I took pictures of everything because I knew I wanted to document it. I’ll be doing this post about breakfast and then separate posts for other meals because I have so many pictures.
We were on the Mars in Central America so things might be different on other ships. Unlike the river cruises we didn’t discuss our issues with anyone ahead of time to get accommodations. We just handled each meal as it came.
For breakfast there is an option of having it delivered to your room. We never did this. Here is the menu that you can choose from.
We always went to the buffet.
This was my typical breakfast. I’m a savory breakfast person so can I just say, Thank you British people for normalizing beans with breakfast.
Every item on the buffet has a placard that lists the major allergens that it contains. That was amazing.
They also say if something contains meat. I really appreciated this. I did get annoyed though because there were things that could have easily been vegan but weren’t. Why were the sautéed mushrooms always done with dairy, why????
If you prefer a sweeter breakfast, you could have a vegan waffle made for you by request. They also always had at least one vegan pastry available.
It wasn’t the overwhelming variety of pastries that were available for non-vegans but it was more than I expected to have available on a daily basis. I made sure to have a slice every day just to make sure they knew that people wanted it to be there. That’s the story I’m sticking to.
Yes, this was a labeled vegan raspberry croissant.
They also had a variety of milks available for coffee or drinking.
I’m not exactly sure what “vegan milk” is other than soy or almond.
There was also cereal available and an East Asian breakfast station but that didn’t always have a vegan option.
There is a lighter breakfast in other areas of the ship but the one I saw was Scandinavian themed and had no vegan options.
Breakfast was pretty easy. Stay tuned for what happened with other meals and snacks.