What Standards Do I Require for Dining and Food Quality?
Food—its quality and the overall dining experience—is cited by most passengers as a critical element of their cruise. The fare on cruise ships is generally very good—impressive considering that shipboard meals represent the ultimate extension of catered banquet dining. Feeding 300 to 1,600 persons at a sitting is challenging under any circumstances. Doing it at sea with attention to detail, quality ingredients and preparation, multiple courses, and beautiful presentation is one of cruising’s miracles. Ships have made an art of serving palatable food to crowds of diners. Hotel food and beverage managers could learn a lot from cruise ship chefs.
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Even an informal ship might ask passengers not to wear shorts and tank tops in the dining room and be strict about it.
However, you can’t expect the same excellence from a galley serving hundreds of dinners as you can from an upscale restaurant cooking to order for a small number of guests. A few small ships have cuisine rivaling better land-based restaurants, and small alternative or specialty restaurants on newer large ships can hold their own with the best of them.
The quality of meals and sophistication of the dining experience vary considerably among ships. Although luxury ships serving fewer passengers in single seatings have the greatest potential for serving memorable meals, midmarket lines like Celebrity, Holland America, and Princess have shown they can approach similar standards of excellence serving larger numbers.
If you have a refined palate and eat exclusively in the finest restaurants, you may meet your dining requirements only in the high-end group of cruise ships. If, however, you dine regularly in restaurants of varying quality, are acquainted with the world’s major cuisines, and understand the limitations of cruise food service, you will find numerous ships capable of meeting or exceeding your expectations.
For those not hung up on gourmet food, there are many suitable, and even better, affordable, cruises. You can use your cruise dining experience to broaden your culinary horizons, or you can save bucks aboard a ship specializing in good but less-expensive American fare. Many people pay for food much fancier than their taste requires. Meat-and-potatoes people get a better deal putting their dollars into a cabin upgrade on a midmarket line rather than paying for fancy food on a luxury line.
Cruise lines have tended to offer good dining-room meals or good buffets, but seldom both. Almost all lines have eliminated the midnight buffet, except for one special late-night extravaganza on some ships when chefs go all out to show off their culinary skills. Under Norwegian Cruise Line’s “Freestyle Cruising” program, you can eat in one of two main dining rooms, at whatever time you choose during normal hours of operation, or you can make reservations at any of six alternative restaurants. On the Norwegian Sun, for example, Le Bistro serves French cuisine; East Meets West offers Pacific Rim and Asian fusion fare; Las Ramblas offers tapas bar fare; Il Adagio offers Italian cuisine; Pacific Heights specializes in healthy, light California cuisine; and Ginza offers sushi, sashimi, and teppanyaki dining. If none of that works for you, the Garden Café operates a buffet around the clock, or alternatively there’s 24-hour room service. The reservationsonly alternative restaurants impose a surcharge of $10 to $30 per person, but it’s worth it. The restaurants are elegant, quiet, and intimate, and the food rivals that of good onshore restaurants—or perhaps more relevant, the fare served on ships in the luxury market. Boomers love the flexibility these multiple restaurants provide. Aside from the surcharge, the main downside is that you don’t have the opportunity to meet people and form friendships as you would in a conventional dining arrangement, where you eat in the same place, at the same assigned table, and with the same people, every night—a feature important to more “traditional cruisers.”
Among other cruise-dining innovators, Princess’s Personal Choice Dining program offers multiple restaurants and no assigned seating; or alternatively, passengers can opt for the traditional dining arrangement. The Disney Cruise Line also features several dining venues, but on the Disney ships, passengers rotate among three different themed restaurants according to a prearranged schedule. And, in a concession to those passengers who develop a fondness for their waitstaff, their waiter and assistant rotate right along with them. Carnival, with yet another approach, offers “total choice” dining, where passengers can choose from four seating times in the main dining room, instead of the usual two; some other lines are also doing this. The four seatings stagger the arrival of diners, preventing the galley from being inundated, and allowing both chefs and waitstaff to concentrate on a smaller number of diners at a given time.
Weather and lifestyle have clearly affected cruise dining. Because most ships spend all or part of the year in the Caribbean and Mexico, where passengers remain in their bathing suits most of the day, the lines found that it makes sense and saves money to expand the lido breakfast and lunch. Lido dining also gives passengers relief from the regimentation of dining-room hours.
A recent trend in onboard dining is the availability of stand-alone specialty restaurants in addition to the main dining room and buffet. Found mostly on ships carrying 1,000 or more passengers, and operating like a restaurant on shore, these specialized eateries offer an intimacy and ambience impossible to match in the ship’s grand dining room. Like most upscale restaurants, the seagoing versions accept reservations; alternatively, you can just show up during operating hours and hope to get a table. Cuisines and specialties available run the gamut from steak to sushi, Cantonese to California nouvelle cuisine. Almost all charge a fee ranging from $10 to $30, and most are worth every penny. Especially notable are QM2’s Todd English, Princess’s Sabatini, and Carnival’s ship-top steak and seafood restaurants.
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