bassmk

Bonaire: Up early again and went to MDR breakfast. We were sat next to the couple who sat next to us at the teppanyaki dinner, and who was their server for breakfast? None other than Miguel. (We had Miguel’s assistant, who was great.) Both of their orders were SO wrong, and the guy got two more wrong plates of food before giving up. No kidding, he asked for a slice of cheddar cheese to make his own breakfast sandwich out of the croissant and sausage he ordered, and Miguel brought toast and cream cheese. He tried again to explain what he wanted and Miguel brought the broken egg sandwich from the menu. Bob and I looked at each other and realized we made the right decision to avoid the MDR dinners the rest of the week. We didn’t get off the ship in Bonaire. We’ve been there once already and like I said before…sloth was the name of the game. We slathered up with sunscreen and headed over to the Tides Pool for some sun, reading, pool time, and people watching. For lunch, the line was forever long at the pizza station, Blue Iguana, and Guy’s Burgers, so I decided to get us both sandwiches from the deli. Whew. The deli was an experience I will not be repeating. I noticed two staff members in line waiting for their food (having already ordered it) when I walked up. I waited in line for probably 10 minutes, and after I ordered, I noticed the staff members still waiting. One of them asked about her sandwich, and the deli worker snapped at her, “When it’s ready, I’ll give it to you.” I couldn’t believe it. I watched them put my husband’s sandwich in the warmer and kept waiting for them to move on to my sandwich. They never did. They handed me my husband’s sandwich and I asked about mine. I repeated my order and she looked around confused, and then moved on to take someone else’s order. The staff member asked a different deli employee about her sandwich and repeated her order. The deli employee looked around and couldn’t find it, but then moved on to someone else in line. I decided to speak up and say, “Can you please make her sandwich?” and repeated her order. She had been in line for at, bare minimum, 25 minutes at this point. I don’t know how long their lunch breaks are, but I cannot fathom they’re very long at all. I was stared at and then ignored. I asked about my other sandwich. Yet again stared at and ignored. I asked yet again with a more firm, irritated tone, and the deli employee mumbled something in my direction in a whisper tone and pointed to the back kitchen area. I asked her to repeat what she said and she moved on to take someone else’s order. By this time Bob’s sandwich was stone cold, so I said forget it, left the plate there, and left. The poor staff member still never received her grilled cheese with bacon as far as I know. I stomped away, so pissed, but then calmed down when I got back out to the pool area, as the pizza line had let up! I got us some pepperoni pizza, took some deep breaths, and resumed my sunbathing and swimming. Dinner was at Fahrenheit 555 tonight! There’s been some back and forth on the Princess boards about whether $39 is too high for the Crown Grille (equivalent specialty restaurant on Princess), and I am firmly in the camp of that is an incredible value for what you get. Fahrenheit 555 is $48pp and I still think the value is amazing. (Restaurants around Nashville charge that and more for a single entrée in a lot of cases.) I got the risotto to start, a filet with broccoli and mushrooms, and the cheesecake for dessert. Bob got a pork belly appetizer, the spice-rubbed ribeye with fries (with bourbon seasoned salt), and crème brulee for dessert. There was an amuse-bouche served beforehand, but for the life of me I cannot remember what it was! I remember liking it. Our whole meal was beyond delicious. It was scrumptious. All the food adjectives applied. It was also SO MUCH and SO RICH. We felt so yucky afterwards, but it was sure good going down. I also did the suggested wine pairing, which was ½ pour for each course and cost $22. I’ve never done that before and it was fun. We went straight back to the cabin and wallowed around, feeling like beached whales for a while. It was truly unpleasant, but it was our own fault. We kept eating even when we knew we were way too full. MISERABLE. We had some Tums and went to bed.

I saw the cake/dessert station and was so excited to try them! Some were good, some looked a lot better than they tasted. (That's not to say they weren't tasty!) Honestly, I was a little sad this time with regards to the buffet bc I know a lot of it was a me problem. Things just didn't sound or look good to me and that's never been the case.

I know, and normally we would have! But I studied the menus for the upcoming nights and wasn't in love with them. Plus we wanted to try a lot of the different specialty places anyway, so we just decided to go that direction.

I really do think it was our particular wait staff that was the issue. The others we experienced at breakfast were great!

Aruba: Up early for MDR breakfast. Much happier with the breakfast-only menu! After eating we got some fancy coffees from the coffee shop and went back to the cabin to clean up. We got off the ship to walk around the port area a bit. We were both having quite a bit of pain that day (chronic pain disorder for me and impending knee replacement for him), so we didn’t venture *too* far, but we wanted to get a little bit of exercise and see the sights. We decided to have lunch at Iguana Joe’s (I think that was the name?) and it was okay. We ordered chips and salsa, which came with regular salsa and a corn/black bean salsa. The regular salsa was really good, but Bob took one bite of the other and told me not to eat too much of it. He said it had a weird, effervescent “wang” to it. Of course I had to see for myself, and he was right…I think it had spoiled/fermented. Yikes. Anyway, my fish tacos were fine and the chicken part of his jerk chicken sandwich was pretty tasty. As a sandwich it was way too messy and unwieldy to manage, so he just ate it with his knife and fork. No biggie, he enjoyed it! After quite a bit more walking around, we went back onboard to rest our legs. We didn’t nap, but we laid around for quite a while. We got ready for dinner, which, happily, was at Bonsai Teppanyaki! I noticed on embarkation day that the reservation I made (a year in advance…it’s possible I get too excited when planning cruises) wasn’t showing up. In fact, the entire restaurant never showed up as an option at all in the “Food and Drinks” section of the HUB app the entire week. When I checked about it on embarkation day, I was told the chef was sick and it would be closed all week. Before we got off the ship in Aruba, though, I happened to walk by, and they were setting the tables up for that night! I asked the hostess, and she said that they were able to open, and our reservation was still good. HOORAY! I love teppanyaki. The whole silly show is so fun, and the food is always good. Bonsai Teppanyaki didn’t let me down. You get one of each of the starters, an entrée, and a bento box of desserts. The appetizers didn’t appeal to a lot of the people at our table, but Bob and I loved them. (Seared tuna, miso soup, and pork belly.) I got the filet and shrimp, and Bob got the black cod. Bob raved and raved about his fish. He said it was cooked perfectly and the sauce/glaze that was on it was the kind of thing that makes you want to lick your plate. My filet was cooked perfectly as well (rare), and the shrimp were served whole. I’m kinda finnicky about getting my fingers dirty at meals, so I don’t like when I have to pull shrimp out of shells or pull their heads and tails off. They were delicious, though, so I overlooked the little bit of mess. The fried rice and vegetable were also very great, made with copious amounts of garlic butter. We just got a Blackstone at Christmas, so I could see Bob taking mental notes. Hooray for ME! Our chef was a lot of fun, he kept us laughing and engaged, and we had a great time along with a great meal. I’ll give you three guesses as to what we did after dinner. LOL I made friends with Parichat, a bartender at the Atrium Bar, and made sure to order drinks from her every night while we sat an observed.

Sea Day #2: Let me preface this by saying that Bob and I are BORING. We don’t drink much, and we aren’t into things like the ropes course or the water slides or anything like that. Most of our days were spent doing trivia or sitting on the deck/in the atrium just observing, sunning, and enjoying not being at work. Both our jobs have just finished a very busy and stressful period, so our theme for this cruise was SLOTH. We skipped the Sea Day Brunch after not loving the options yesterday, but also not wanting to wait until 8:30. We were up around 7:30 again, so we got coffee at the coffee shop and then went up to the buffet. I’m sure you can guess how I felt about that, so I decided to go to Blue Iguana and get us breakfast burritos. YUM. They were absolutely delicious. For some reason I don’t remember what we had for lunch! That probably means we went to the buffet bc I remember all the other meals. LOL Naps were had, trivia was played, and then we cleaned up for dinner. We decided we were done with the MDR for the remainder of the cruise, and we figured Miguel and his team wouldn’t hate having fewer people to deal with. (NO we didn’t remove/adjust the gratuities that I pre-paid. Someone at our table was discussing doing that bc of the terrible service and I didn’t agree at all.) We decided to try Cucina del Capitano, and I’m here to report that it was excellent. Our server, Simone, let me get two starters since I couldn’t decide between the arancini and the burrata. They were both out of this world delicious, but the arancini I think took first place. The burrata was delicious, but the chardonnay-poached grape tomatoes served with it blew me away. I hate tomatoes, and I could have eaten a plate full of these suckers. OMG so good. I had the veal scaloppini as an entrée and some ridiculous chocolate/coffee dessert that I was too stuffed for but ate anyway. Bob had calamari, pasta with pork and lamb ragu, and a polenta cake thing with lemon sorbet for dessert. He said his meal was equally delicious. Big, big thumbs up and recommendations for Cucina del Capitano! Rinse and repeat…sat in the atrium for about an hour and then to bed by 10:00.

GAH! I just realized a typo in the thread title! 🤦‍♀️

Sea Day #1: We woke up around 7:30 and decided to try the Sea Day Brunch in the MDR. It didn’t open for another hour, so we went up to the coffee shop to get coffees and wait until we could check in. About 8:20, you could check-in on the HUB app, so I did that. Right at 8:30 I got notification our table was ready so we headed down to the restaurant. We sat at a table fully aft and had a good view of the wake and of the Celebrity Equinox following/passing us. Very pleasant. The food was good. I noticed that it looks like they’ve changed their hollandaise recipe on the eggs benedict. It used to be very thick and a little pasty/manufactured tasting. It’s a bit thinner now and tastes more like the hollandaise I’m used to. My husband wasn’t super impressed with the menu…nothing sounded especially good to him. I agree a bit…the breakfast options were limited and I didn’t feel like having a burger at 8:30am. Everything we got was good, though, and the service was wonderful. We spent the rest of the day doing trivia (I won twice!), watching people, NAPPING, and eating. For lunch we went up to the buffet and were again unimpressed with the options. I can’t remember what we wound up eating, but it was good. The food wasn’t BAD, there just weren’t as many options as I remember. Nothing seemed particularly appetizing/appealing. (Granted…I just started a new medicine that keeps me a little icky-feeling all the time, so I will credit that maybe with how I felt about food sometimes on this cruise.) Dinner again in the MDR with Miguel and his team. It was again TERRIBLE. I never felt angry at or too annoyed with Miguel, I felt awful for him, in fact. He absolutely shouldn’t have been on the dining room staff. He is better suited elsewhere, I think. He was overwhelmed and lost and his assistants were too busy with way too many other tables to help him when he was in the weeds. This time he mixed up all of our orders for every course. The same group of eight showed up and each one of us had one or more dishes wrong. Around 6:30, another pair of ladies showed up and sat down. This is my absolute pet peeve. With assigned dining, you have a set time, and that’s when you show up. A long, long time ago I read Cruise Confidential by Brian David Bruns (HIGHLY RECOMMEND), and I learned from him that showing up on time and ordering your food IN ORDER is vitally important to both the wait staff and the galley staff. Ordering another appetizer when they’ve moved on to entrée service throws a stick in the spokes down in the galley and is an inconvenience of the highest degree. These ladies showed up as we were all finishing our starters and surrounding tables had their entrees. They didn’t know how to pull up the menu from the QR code, so poor Miguel had to stop what he was doing to find a paper menu (and I do mean…track down. He didn’t come back for a WHILE.) And then they took forever, criticizing all the options and turning their noses up at everything. Bob and I were turning inside out from the second-hand embarrassment. Our entrees arrived just then, so we scarfed them down as fast as possible and got the hell out of there before we even had dessert. It was elegant night, so we posted up in some chairs by the Atrium bar for some prime people watching. Everyone was decked out! I don’t remember folks on Carnival going all-out like this for elegant night, but I was so glad to see all the sequins and gowns and suits! My husband and I love dressing up for special occasions, so we are always glad to see people really participate on elegant night. We sat there for probably a couple of hours and then decided to get our dessert from the coffee shop. By the time we got there, my sugar craving had passed (dang that medicine!) but Bob got some cookies. We took those back to the cabin and had an early night again.

Hey there! I've never done a review before, but I always enjoy reading them and usually find them helpful and entertaining. One thing I always like is when the font/color/size in the review posts are different from the reply posts, so I’ll be doing that. It helps me if I’m just scrolling quickly through the thread. This is going to be lengthy, so I’ll split it up to avoid major walls of texts whenever possible. I hope you enjoy it! Pre-Cruise Travel: We flew American into Miami and took a cab to the Hampton Inn Brickell-Downtown. It was nice, pretty basic but totally comfortable and adequate for the not-even-twelve-hour stay. Everything was fairly uneventful except for about a 45 minute delay of our flight leaving Nashville. Embarkation Day: We had a light breakfast at the hotel around 7:00 and it was God-awful, but if I don’t eat, my morning vitamins/meds make me sick. I never expect too much from a hotel breakfast bar, but this one was especially bad. After breakfast we cleaned up and headed to the port via Lyft. We purchased FTTF and during check-in I reserved the 11:30-12 slot. We arrived around 10:15, left our 3 checked bags with the porters, and walked right into security. We verified documents and were herded up to the dog-sniffing area. The cutest Vizsla was tasked with smelling everyone’s luggage before we could proceed. I think she alerted to someone’s bag, but it must have just smelled like previously-smoked pot or something bc there seemed to be no problems for them. After that we sent our carry-on bags through the x-ray machine, proceeded to the photo station, and then walked onto the ship! We were onboard right before 11:00. We immediately went up to Lido for something to eat (the hotel breakfast was long gone!) and the buffet was freshly set up. I wasn’t super impressed with the options, but I got the pepper steak and it was very good. I also liked the stracciatella offered at the charcuterie station. I got that several times throughout the week. It had sundried tomatoes and basil on top with salt and pepper in a bowl off to the side. I doctored it up with some of that plus a splash of balsamic and olive oil and ate it with some of the grilled focaccia they had available. SO DELICIOUS. I only had my backpack as a carry-on, so we didn’t bother to drop anything off in the cabin before it was ready. We did some exploring, got the first of many ice cream cones, and found a place to sit and watch people arrive. Right at 1:30 we went down to our cabin, 8331. It was ready for us and we met Heri, our cabin steward. He was very friendly and extremely attentive the entire week. Our bags were SO SLOW to arrive. The first two arrived as we were walking out the door for dinner, and the last one was MIA until well after dinner. We went to Guest Services to figure it out, and they had us complete a form but didn't want to make any promises. That definitely didn't make us feel great, and we walked away feeling extremely anxious. Finally, a lady from a couple cabins down knocked on the door after we had gone to bed to bring it to us, as it had been delivered to her by mistake. Dinner that night was…I won’t say it was a disaster, but it was definitely just this side of a disaster. I chalked it up to embarkation day hiccups. We had the 6:00 seating in the Reflections restaurant at a table for 12. (I think the last time my husband and I had a shared table was back in 2017! Somehow we’ve gotten a 2-top for assigned dining ever since then.) Six people plus my husband and me showed up the first night. Our server team introduced themselves, and the assistants were sharp and on top of everything. Unfortunately, the lead server, Miguel, was not. I don’t know if there was a language barrier (he spoke English well and appeared to understand us when we spoke) or if there was just maybe an age/technology problem…he was not good. I had NEVER had a bad experience with staff in all the 14 cruises I’ve been on, and while Miguel was friendly and nice, I think he was not in the right job for his skill level. He absolutely could not figure out the ipad/tablet/electronic order-taking thing he was using. He didn’t seem to know the menu…I ordered a drink clearly on the menu and he told me they didn’t have that. He even went to the bar and asked and he said they told him they didn’t have it. (This is why I wondered about a language barrier.) He took our orders and disappeared for 30 minutes. The assistants were rushing around getting dishes to the tables around us, but Miguel didn’t bring our starters to the table until about 6:45. They even called for “showtime” before we got starters! He got 3 of them mixed up and one was completely incorrect. No one said anything bc we were starving at that point. The entrees didn’t take as long, but still longer than all the tables around us. Dessert followed in the same fashion. All told, I think it took almost 2 hours for the entire dinner service for our table. After dinner we did some more exploring and we wound up turning in early. We were extremely tired from traveling the day before and the excitement of embarkation, so we were asleep by 10:00.

My dad used to say, "Knock its horns off, wipe its ass, and put it on a plate."

You've never bought a week's worth of groceries and then gone out to eat during that week? Never made your lunch for work and decided to go out instead? My point is that yes, we've paid for meals in our cruise fare, but not ONLY food. That fare covers so much more, and if someone doesn't want to spend more on top of that, they won't. I choose to bc I can and I like it.

MAYBE. Some folks down the way were smoking A LOT of pot and stinking up the place and I doubt anything was done. In fact, I know nothing was done bc the smell persisted the entire week.

THIS. Carnival's steakhouse is $48pp and IMO, it's equally good AT BEST. I think Crown Grille on Princess is a tiny bit better and $9pp less!

Maybe...two different cruise lines (Carnival, Princess), three different times of year (August, October, May)...I don't know. I certainly haven't seen them empty or near empty recently.

Again, that's not been my experience on the last 3 cruises I've been on. The specialty places were sold out most nights. The cruise I was on last week, I had trouble getting a spot before 8pm (at all five options!) on a couple of nights.

I tend to forget because I also spend hundreds (or sometimes a thousand or more) dollars at the grocery store to make food at home and then go out to eat and mid/upper class steakhouses. That's not a great comparison. The bottom line is that if you think it's too much, then it's too much and don't go there. Eat the food you've already paid for in your cruise fare. I'm in the camp that the value is great for what you get in return.

That's not ever been my experience at Crown Grille. I think Sizzler is a bit of a stretch, honestly, but I don't know...maybe you've just had a bad experience. What kind of steak and how you like it cooked can be a factor. I'm not saying that's what's going on with your experiences, but my friends who like their steaks cooked medium and above all say that they don't like steak "that much" and tend to always have negative steakhouse meals. 🤷‍♀️ To each their own, your mileage may vary and all that...I still don't think $39 per person is expensive at all, and even if you feel the steak is mediocre, there is plenty served WITH the entree that justifies the cost.

Think about the level of cuisine and service you're getting. A mid/upper class steakhouse in most cities would charge $39 for one cut of meat, and most times everything else (sides, sauces, etc) are a la carte charges. I find that the specialty restaurants overall are excellent values. I can't speak to the weird upcharge for salmon, though. That's a little weird unless it was a bad fishing season or something.

Just got off the Horizon with this exact itinerary yesterday! Elegant nights were Monday (first sea day) and Friday (Amber Cove).

We did mention it at Guest Services, but I don't know what they could do besides make sure there were no...residuals...in public areas. We could tell happened two decks below us, but it was over before we could could how many cabins down it was.

My husband and I just got off the Horizon yesterday. On our last sea day (Saturday), we were on our balcony and witnessed a man PISSING OFF HIS BALCONY. Keep in mind...the balconies aren't over the water. The roof of the sushi restaurant was directly under us, and a promenade was beyond that. I was absolutely appalled, and it's hard for me to be appalled by anything anymore.

DANG! This is a very good tip! I never considered it before but I definitely will going forward. Thanks for sharing.

I'm partial to the Eastern Caribbean itineraries, myself. To me, if you're trying to sell him on the idea of cruising, go in February (March has way too many spring breakers for my taste!) and cruise out of Port Canaveral or Fort Lauderdale to ports like St. Thomas or Amber Cove...something along those lines. Look for a ship that has been refurbished recently. Even the older ships get neat upgrades when they're dry-docked, so check on the last time it was refurbished to make sure it's got all the fun stuff.

KLG was Godmother of the original Celebration, and her daughter Cassidy is the Godmother of the new one!

That is exactly what I bought! I'd bring my own supply of paper or plastic straws, but I need something pocket-size.