rossneder

I'm going to revive this thread since I've had time to digest my experience on this expedition cruise. First, the expedition staff was great and the service was very good, as was the hotel staff. There was quite a bit of downtime but that's the nature of (at least this one) an expedition cruise.

You may have noticed my less than enthusiastic thoughts on the food.

Clearly, there were a few superb meals but as a whole everything was done as simply and easily as possible. Of course it was, you might think, but this "easy" thing is on a continuum and at the low end it gets pretty disappointing. For example, as a chef, you can make a bean dish that takes very little effort to season and make a nice presentation, or you can open a can and dump it into a serving tray. We got the can . . . every lunch. Same with fruit, sometimes it was cut and fresh, but often just canned. Bread takes a little more time to bake really nice offers or a little less time to produce really poor quality, you know what we got. Frozen raw croissants from Costco that are thawed and cooked would have been remarkable compared to what we got.

Some of my shipmates suggested that we had poor quality ingredients, I couldn't tell that anything was that bad but what I saw was poor preparation. I actually saw the produce being loaded for the next cruise and it looked fine.

I tried to get a galley tour since I'm a chef and thought I would get a better understanding of what was happening. The head chef explained that US law prohibits passengers from the galley. We were in international waters and the ship is registered in the Bahamas. I don't know, Seaborne was thrilled to give me a tour. Where I'm going with this is that maybe the galley was so small they couldn't produce quality meals, frankly, I believe they were just not trying.

For me, I'm not going to try again. Seaborne and Crystal are just great. Possibly menus were planned by some central office, I don't really care why it failed I just know it did. This perspective is just for me, others may love everything about Silversea and that's totally reasonable; I'm not trying to convince anybody I just wanted to share my experience.

Maybe what I'm experiencing is inconsistency vs all poor. Dinner last night was very good, it appeared that all the entres at our table were cooked perfectly.

Thanks for the ideas.

We're crossing the Bering sea right now and scopolamine is my best friend.

I've been on the Nome to Seward cruise for about 5 days and have left each meal in the MDR a little disappointed. Service is OK, wine OK, it's just not like either Seaborn or Crystal.

So the question, what can I do? I have heard about asking for special meals e.g. Thai dinner or a steak. What have you done?