Most boaters aren’t dining on veal carpaccio and lobster bisque with truffle oil while onboard, but then, most aren’t cruising with Richard Lawton.

The Everett-based chef has combined his two passions—boating and cooking—into a career that’s spanned three decades, taken him to tropical islands and involved cooking elaborate meals on luxury yachts. His work has taken him inside a world few see, the rarefied universe of superyachts and the super rich.

Like many careers, Lawton’s has been shaped by both skill and circumstance. In the mid-1980s, he returned from an Air Force stint in Germany, where he’d managed a series of military restaurants and clubs. He spent the summer working at a bakery in his hometown of Newport, Rhode Island. But the work dried up and as the chill of fall settled in, Lawton found himself broke and in need of a plan.

“The only real skill I had was working in a restaurant or a club,” he said. “But I could sail.”

Realizing the winter charter season was soon starting in the tropics, Lawton got himself a job on a yacht headed to St. Thomas. He headed out with $52 in his wallet and a small bag of belongings—some clothes, a cookbook and a couple of knives. Arriving on the island, he promptly headed for the biggest boat on the dock, a 93-foot Cheoy Lee named Odyssey III.

“I heard you’re looking for a chef,” Lawton told the captain, “and I’m the one you want.”

Not your average boat snack: smoked salmon piped into Belgian endive

His show of chutzpah was effective. After cooking a trial dinner for eight that night, Lawton was hired and started work on the yacht the next morning. The lead-up to charter season was intense, with the yacht chefs vying with each other to wine and dine the charter brokers to try to win their business.

Lawton spent the next several years working on a series of large charter boats throughout the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, alternating with stints at restaurants in New England. When the weather started turning cold, Lawton would head back to the tropics.

It was a heady, hectic time. Lawton was making close to $2,000 a week, working from dawn until the guests went to bed at night. During off-season, the tourists thinned out and the crews got to relax, holding barbecues on secluded beaches and enjoying the sun.

“That’s when you learn to relax,” Lawton said. “That makes it possible to do the rest of it.”

Lawton spent a summer working in a restaurant in Antigua, shooting pool with Eric Clapton during his time off and meeting other rock legends who visited the island, including Keith Richards and Pete Townshend.

Lawton loved the variety of the work, which ranged from cooking on a racing charter for 14 strapping Germans who plowed through five pounds of bacon and five dozen eggs at breakfast to serving foie gras, champagne and caviar to the CEO of Reuters and his wife during a charter cruise. Both extremes presented challenges, whether it was keeping up with voraciously hungry guests or sourcing expensive, exotic ingredients and knowing just how much to order.

One memorable trip was a four-month cruise on a 110-foot yacht owned by Bill Scandling, one of the founders of Saga Corporation, a multi-billion dollar food service and restaurant company. Scandling flew in friends for various parts of the cruise, which started from Florida and went up through Nova Scotia and the Great Lakes. Scandling never ate out once during the trip, said Lawton, who stocked the galley with lobster and Scandling’s favorite, dried salt cod.

“He had a passion for that stuff,” Lawton recalled. “His idea of a great meal was a stick of salt cod and a Budweiser.”

Cooking on a yacht is vastly different from cooking in a restaurant, Lawton says. There’s no set menu, requiring yacht chefs to be inventive and able to create a range of dishes for guests with varying tastes. The selection of ingredients is often limited by availability and the lack of storage space on a boat.

And cooking on a vessel underway can be challenging—more than once, Lawton has had to angle an oven rack while a cake cooked to accommodate a boat heeling over as it tacked or as guests moved from one side to the other.

“There are a lot of chefs, a lot of people who can cook in restaurants,” said Lawton, 54. “But there aren’t a lot who can open up a refrigerator with a whole bunch of stuff in it and come up with something different every day.”

And though a yacht charter might seem slower-paced than a busy restaurant, Lawton said the yacht chef is cooking from morning to night, feeding guests not just three meals daily, but also rounds of drinks and hors d’oeuvres in between.

A spread onboard Olympus, where Lawton is the resident chef.

“I had no idea that was what it was like,” Lawton said. “I thought, like everyone else, that you go down and work on a boat and it’s nice and relaxing, you play a little. But when you’re on a charter, it’s long days, every day.”

Lawton learned a few tricks along the way. Instead of making cakes onboard, he started using premade sponge cakes or frozen puff pastry that can easily be turned into appealing, individual desserts. He put ingredients into the boat’s freezer in the reverse order he needed them, to avoid having to dig around.

He learned to stock the galley with a mix of fresh foods and staples that keep a long time, and developed a regular inventory of ingredients that can be used in a variety of dishes.

But Lawton’s work in the tropics came to an end in 2000. At the time, he was working on the 168-foot Enterprise V, one of the Amway Corporation’s yachts, in the Caribbean. His wife, Anna, and daughter Catherine, then 2, were back in the United States, living in the Northwest. Frequently out of cell phone range and unable to communicate regularly with his family, Lawton quit the job after a couple of months, leaving the boat in St. Thomas.

“I couldn’t be away,” Lawton said. “That’s when I swore I’d never, ever go back on a boat, because the only ones I knew were in the Caribbean and were away for a long time.”

Back in the Northwest, Lawton looked unsuccessfully for another job. Despite his experience and previous training at the prestigious Johnson & Wales College of Culinary Arts on Rhode Island, Lawton found himself competing with younger chefs for low-paying restaurant jobs. Unable to get an offer, he became a volunteer art teacher at his daughter’s elementary school and continued to keep an eye out for any opportunities that sounded promising.

A lucky break came in the spring of 2008. Lawton saw an ad on Craigslist for a chef position on Olympus, a 97-foot, 1929 fantail yacht moored in Seattle. Owner Diane VanDerbeek was looking for someone with experience working on yachts. Lawton fit the bill.

He’s been cooking on Olympus since then, accompanying VanDerbeek to yachting events, and on private cruises and charters around the Northwest. For the annual Victoria Classic Boat Festival, Lawton prepares hors d’oeuvres for 200, filling the stately wooden boat with food. He’s done everything from informal lunches to nine-course dinners, typically cooking for between two and eight guests.

Lawton enjoys the creative freedom of his work. He strives to entertain guests, to serve them the food they like in new, unexpected ways.

Working on Olympus, “I can live at home and do the cooking I like to do,” Lawton said, “and also work on a boat, which is what I like to do.”

Chef Lawton offers the following tips for aspiring boat chefs to kick up their onboard cooking a notch or two:

1. Never buy any food for boat cooking that does not have more than one use.
2. Try not to generate leftovers, since space is limited. If you do have leftovers, turn them into a different dish to double their use – for example, leftover risotto can be flavored differently or dressed up with bits of crisp pancetta. Fry until golden and serve with a herb salad for a light, easy lunch.
3. If you’re going to use a new recipe on the boat, try it at home first. It’s better to have a failure at home than on your boat, where you might not have alternate choices to make quickly if your recipe is a flop.
4. Consider having a chef at a local restaurant prepare your favorite dish from the menu. Tell them you want to serve it onboard; most will pack it up for you, and some might even give you a simple recipe to follow that will be close to what’s served in the restaurant.
5. Bring along one or two special ingredients that can make meals memorable. For example, winter white truffles, though a little pricey, can be shaved over your morning eggs or whipped into mashed potatoes for a treat your guests will remember for years.
6. Prep ingredients in advance and package in zip-loc bags or stackable containers. For example, if you’re serving salad, it’s much easier to wash and dry the lettuce at home where there’s more room, then you can just assemble the salad onboard.
7. If you plan to serve fish, keep it on ice in your fridge and change the ice every day; it should keep for a week that way.
8. If you want it, bring it with you. Many places in the Northwest have no market or only convenience stores, and getting fresh food can be a challenge.
9. Fresh herbs are very perishable and lose their flavor rapidly. If you want to use fresh herbs on your cruise, chop them or grind them and keep them in olive oil and they’ll retain their flavor.
10. Don’t be afraid to get your guests involved in meal planning or even ask them to bring a dish or snacks. More hands make for less work.