Awful food on Harmony of the Seas

[chukli]

On 4/9/2023 at 10:20 AM, jetta8300 said:

That's very interesting, we have a lot of Indian, Thai and other asian restaurants around my house and most indian dishes onboard were almost as good.  Maybe not quite as good but they had quite a bit of flavor, unlike the other choices at the Windjammer.  But the dishes were all extremely spicy.

I haven’t cruised since 2016, but really enjoyed the vegetarian Indian food and appreciated the special Indian vegetarian food cooked for the family in the MDR.  The head chef would ask us what kind of Indian dishes we would like and my 90 year old father would start listing popular dishes served in restaurants and we actually got those dishes most of the time. We were surprised when cruisers on adjacent tables would show an interest in trying the dishes and we loved to share. It was little spicy for me but my dad loved it (probably because he labels my cooked Indian dishes as “hospital food” ! I hope I get good vegetarian food, including Indian food on the upcoming cruise on the Allure.

[cruiseboy89130]

3 hours ago, chukli said:

I hope I get good vegetarian food, including Indian food on the upcoming cruise on the Allure.

Keep hoping!🤞

[shofer]

We had the same experience on Vision OTS in 2015.  My friend was eating sliders almost every evening.  The buffet was boring, no good desserts and the food was blah.  On the survey, I scored the food a great fat big ZERO.

We must not have been alone in this opinion as we sailed Vision again in 2017 and the food was much, much better.  The buffet actually had real desserts and not just slices of sheet cake and jello.   The MDR menu had better choices and most of the food was pretty tasty.

[Engineroom Snipe]

9 hours ago, jetta8300 said:

I’m not sure what you mean hmmmm?  I mean the Indian dishes were very flavorful and well done.  And if we had a high tolerance for spice they would be delicious. However we do not have a high tolerance for spice so they were inedible. I could take 2 bites and say “yum”! And then couldn’t eat more than two bites because we were on fire. 

 

Yes, certain spices can, when they first hit your tongue, taste somewhat mild and then continue to get more heat as they envelope your whole mouth as you swallow. There are many "Fri Diablo" seafood dishes that are cumulative. I like hot spicey dishes but sometimes I have to have a piece of garlic toast on the side to clear the tastebuds and throat from the heat.  🤯

[Sigyn]

Desserts have been mentioned several times here. I was underwhelmed by the desserts as a whole. Of course we tried them. We love our sweets! The buffet desserts at Windjammer were all very meh and not worth the calories. The MDR desserts were the same. The melting chocolate cake was just a lump of chocolate cake with what seemed to be chocolate syrup squirted on to make it seem like "melting" chocolate cake. And in the specialty restaurants, while the desserts looked gorgeous, they were either overly sweet with no specific flavor other than sugar (the pavlova in Jamie's) or just pretty without anything else to redeem them, but decent enough that we still ate half. (We're not animals!) The lemon meringue cheesecake at Jamie's fell into this category. It looked utterly amazing, but it didn't have a strong enough lemon flavor and the cheesecake wasn't creamy enough. It was just meh as far as cheesecake goes. The meringue on it was delicious, tho. The red velvet cake in Chops was about a 6 on a scale of 1-10. It was just cake. The frosting wasn't good. The cake was average. I can make better myself, and have. Oh, the churros in Sabor. My son loved those. I didn't taste them, however, so I can't comment. 

Came back to say I remembered the warm apple pie in Chops - that was pretty, pretty good. 

Edited April 11, 2023 by njsmom

[lovesthebeach2]

On 4/9/2023 at 12:21 PM, Ret MP said:

Decent review with a little positive along with the negatives.  Good job.

 

Cruise on her again in a few weeks/couple of months and the culinary staff/team will probably have changed and the food MAY be the best you've ever had on a cruise line, MAYBE!  It's the people, not the ship that prepares and presents food.  And the food providers/sources/distributors may change as well.  

 

We'll be on her in January and hope we have the good culinary staff/team and suppliers.  

 

 

Different people may cook the food but the person in charge of what’s coming out of the kitchens needs to be watching and serving  food that’s consistently good, not based on a roll of the dice of a new crew in a couple of months. No restaurant would be able to stay in business if they just relied on the cooks. 
Whomever is in charge in the kitchens is not doing their job properly on these ships.

[bucfan2]

12 minutes ago, lovesthebeach2 said:

Different people may cook the food but the person in charge of what’s coming out of the kitchens needs to be watching and serving  food that’s consistently good, not based on a roll of the dice of a new crew in a couple of months. No restaurant would be able to stay in business if they just relied on the cooks. 
Whomever is in charge in the kitchens is not doing their job properly on these ships.

Certainly a subjective discussion.  Just off Explorer...food (and service) consistently excellent.  Dice in the casino subjective as well.

[d9704011]

2 minutes ago, bucfan2 said:

Dice in the casino subjective as well.

Things didn't go as well for you there as you had hoped?

[bucfan2]

3 minutes ago, d9704011 said:

Things didn't go as well for you there as you had hoped?

Whenever it's free entertainment, I consider it good enough.  

[LobsterStalker]

21 hours ago, dunrobbin said:

Sadly, we are on our first suite cruise on May 7th on Brilliance.

No Coastal Kitchen on Brilliance

Not sure if there is any Suite dining option on our cruise.

Coastal kitchen is only for suites, so with the prices of the cruise, they better be giving decent food!

 

why so sad ?

[BobNoxious]

22 hours ago, cruiseboy89130 said:

You realize your experience is WAY out of date? Significant changes since February of 2023!

Not in the specialty restaurants.   Just the MDR's changed their menus "significantly"

[Denversail]

Wrong post

 

 

Edited April 11, 2023 by Denversail

[LobsterStalker]

17 hours ago, Montanagirlalways said:

I feel the same about the quality of the food. I was on the Jewel and the Wonder recently. Food in the MDR left a lot to be desired in my opinion. We joined a table of 6 couples last month on the Jewel. Every night someone was sending something back- meat was too tough, food was cold, food just wasn't good.  I guess the best way to let them know is to tell the head waiters and the chefs and to put remarks on the surveys.

Complaints to the head waiters may carry some weight , but I believe that the post cruise surveys are probably the best way to get the points driven home .( Aside from spending your cruise $'s elsewhere) Though the dining experience is an important part of our cruising , DW and I are not really too bothered if something is not just right .

...However 1 thing I will be changing is the way I approach the post cruise surveys from now on . 

. Honesty will definitely be the catalyst going forward for my ratings. Since restart we've done 2 cruises last fall and 1 this past February and have definitely seen declines in all areas but especially in the Dining. Because we are pretty easy to please It hasn't bothered me a whole lot , but reading many posts here have made me realize that with the amount of money I spend to do this , If management things things are 'Just Peachy'  based on the reviews they read , coupled with all of us just continuing to pay up for declining service and quality, then that is on me ! I have always given high marks 'just because ' , and have been guilty of falling into the trap of the waiters request for a 10 because they are nice people... That's gonna change !

Next B2B in October... Will have a great time , but not expecting the Spectacular

 

Cheers

[Ret MP]

2 hours ago, lovesthebeach2 said:

Different people may cook the food but the person in charge of what’s coming out of the kitchens needs to be watching and serving  food that’s consistently good, not based on a roll of the dice of a new crew in a couple of months. No restaurant would be able to stay in business if they just relied on the cooks. 
Whomever is in charge in the kitchens is not doing their job properly on these ships.

Yep, basically 100% right-on.  But like I said, or eluded to, "the person in charge", can and does change, OFTEN.  So, his/her standards go with him/her.  Has nothing to do with the ship.  The ship is basically a constant, the crew, including the culinary staff is not.  A land based restaurant has little in common with a ship's galley.  Just like us, the people eating the food, taste is subjective, inspecting prepared food as it comes out of the kitchen is subjective by different chefs, different cultures, different schools, different moods, different whatever's.  Generally speaking, a land based restaurant has some sort of constant!  A good highly paid chef can be employed there for years. And it is likely that the management will have been there for years.  In many other cases, the owner(s), are there to protect their investment.  Ships culinary management, just like the ship's Captain, moves on to a different ship about every ~6 months.  Very little to no personnel continuity.  

 

I think, in other words, my opinion, what I've stated isn't intended to necessarily add up to being a good or bad thing and/or produce good or bad things, the things could be different from minor to major. That's it, nothing more, nothing less.

 

 

[Pandamonia]

On 4/9/2023 at 5:12 PM, njsmom said:

Just got off of Harmony of the Seas. I was surprised at how bad the food was. We've cruised Carnival and Norwegian and the Royal Caribbean food was on par with Carnival. Which is to say, not good. Norwegian's food is quite good, and the specialty restaurants on Norwegian are as good as fine dining restaurants in the real world, but Royal Caribbean is just blech.

We did the Unlimited Dining Package and ate in specialty restaurants much of the time to try to overcome the yucky food factor, to no avail. Chops, 150 Central Park, Sabor...the food was all pretty meh. Jamie's was delicious for lunch one day, but the very same dish - prawns with linguine - ordered for dinner another night was dry and disappointing as if it had been sitting out for hours, waiting for someone to order it and then they'd heated it up again. The pasta carbonara was a favorite of my son's every time he tried it, fortunately. If I had to pick a decent specialty restaurant, I'd opt for Jamie's, since sometimes it was good and some dishes were tasty. The lamb chops at dinner were very good. But the eggplant parmigiana, not so much. 

At Chops, the steaks were tough and overcooked. The bacon appetizer was a strip of fatty, wet pork. The mushroom soup was a win, however. At 150 Central Park, the pork belly was literally a blob of crispy fat with not a speck of actual meat within it. The tenderloin for two was overcooked. The lobster thermidor was chewy and meh. We cancelled a second dinner we had scheduled at 150 Central Park out of disappointment from night #1. The ceviche at Sabor had to be sent back. It was bland and the texture was weird. The shrimp tacos were overly salty. But the guac was good. Wonderland was fun, but only half of the dishes tasted good. On and on...we did formal night in the MDR and were completely underwhelmed.

 

On the positives, the hibachi restaurant was very good, and we thoroughly enjoyed that but it was no different than any hibachi restaurant you'd find at home. The Izumi sushi restaurant was good, too, but it wasn't outstanding, just a regular sushi restaurant. But since we'd had such awful food until that point, we were happy to have edible food we could enjoy. I did really like the Greek salad I had on CocoCay from the snack shack on Chill Island. That was very good and completely surprised me. 

 

We did Windjammer for breakfast each morning and that was actually okay. Funny that the buffet was the best thing we did. Maybe because I just ate yogurt and fruit  and my son ate pastries and waffles. Altho the coffee was lukewarm. My son enjoyed Sorrento's Pizza, but I didn't try it. 

I was so disappointed in the food. I had hoped it would be better and that everyone's complaints were overblown. They were not. 

 

I said the same about the food and speciality sucking on Wonder. 

 

Hibatchi and Izumi were the only highlights with a little of hooked being good too. But overall Royals food standards suck and their prices are not reflective of the standard delivered at all. 

 

If the food is just as bad on Anthem i wont be booking Royal again. 

[livylotte]

Recently off Rhapsody and we thought the food was very bland. 
Opted for Indian whenever it was available and even that tasted bland. I wouldn’t say the Indian food on Royal Caribbean has ever been ‘hot’ though. I’d say most of it is pretty mild.  However, we do have a lot of curry at home so my tastebuds may be a little immune 🥵

[lovesthebeach2]

17 minutes ago, Ret MP said:

Yep, basically 100% right-on.  But like I said, or eluded to, "the person in charge", can and does change, OFTEN.  So, his/her standards go with him/her.  Has nothing to do with the ship.  The ship is basically a constant, the crew, including the culinary staff is not.  A land based restaurant has little in common with a ship's galley.  Just like us, the people eating the food, taste is subjective, inspecting prepared food as it comes out of the kitchen is subjective by different chefs, different cultures, different schools, different moods, different whatever's.  Generally speaking, a land based restaurant has some sort of constant!  A good highly paid chef can be employed there for years. And it is likely that the management will have been there for years.  In many other cases, the owner(s), are there to protect their investment.  Ships culinary management, just like the ship's Captain, moves on to a different ship about every ~6 months.  Very little to no personnel continuity.  

 

I think, in other words, my opinion, what I've stated isn't intended to necessarily add up to being a good or bad thing and/or produce good or bad things, the things could be different from minor to major. That's it, nothing more, nothing less.

 

 

True, but food being cooked to the proper temperature so that the food isn’t even warm isn’t subjective IMO, nor is cooking it so any kind of protein (fish, poultry or red meats) is so tough it’s almost inedible. Those are the things the head chef is responsible for and we didn’t see it on our cruises since January.
 

The negative changes I’ve seen are not related so much to the taste of the food or menu changes, but to the quality of the food we were served. I know that is different on every ship, but when Royal reads the comments here, the other social media site and the post cruise comments, someone should take notice. When our kids were growing up I was able to make healthy meals that didn’t cost a fortune and tasted really good.  I know royal cut back on expensive foods, but that wouldn’t be an issue for us if it was cooked and served properly. And of course this is just my opinion based on the cruises we’ve been on since January.

 

 

[time4u2go]

13 minutes ago, lovesthebeach2 said:

when Royal reads the comments here, the other social media site and the post cruise comments, someone should take notice

What you say makes sense, but as long as ships are sailing full, they have little reason to do anything about the negative comments.

[jencruzin]

15 hours ago, topnole said:

That’s great for him.  I’m happy for him.  But the eyeroll part would suggest something a little more than that.  It would seem they looked down on the other poster for their comment.  
 

And I didn’t bring up the whole Navy thing in the first place (which one assumes they are taking this a bit too seriously-not me).  As can be seen in my first post on this side topic in the thread, I stated “to be fair” and then simply said what I said because you can always go to that example for anything if you want.  But that doesn’t mean everyone is unappreciative of the military and freedom if they complain about something.  I could theoretically complain about the food on a cruise and still appreciate the brave men and women who serve our country in many capacities (including outside of the military).  Ironic that I’m the one defending the other poster’s freedom of speech.  Nothing too serious about my point.  Just obvious logic.  

Logic....ok.

Edited April 11, 2023 by jencruzin

[jencruzin]

16 hours ago, rolloman said:

You don't get too fussy about food but you are reading and posting multiple times on a fussy food thread??? Lighten up about the Navy...he is just proud to be a Sailor and made a comment about food and how it equates to the food onboard a warship. Sorry you took it so literally. 

DH is ok but he feels the other guy might be just a slow person, so he told me to leave it be. He's looking up your pic in his cruise book. Thanks again.

[LobsterStalker]

4 hours ago, lovesthebeach2 said:

Different people may cook the food but the person in charge of what’s coming out of the kitchens needs to be watching and serving  food that’s consistently good, not based on a roll of the dice of a new crew in a couple of months. No restaurant would be able to stay in business if they just relied on the cooks. 
Whomever is in charge in the kitchens is not doing their job properly on these ships.

While I agree  that the head chef and others are responsible for all the food that comes out , they do not have control over the hiring of under qualified employees . There is no magic wand that can create skill that doesn't exist among a staff , therefore at times there is nothing that can be done .Keep in mind this is a 24/7 operation onboard where the EXEC's have little to no time to "babysit" . Bottomline, the results (and the blame) still come back to that Executive Chef in charge of the kitchen . 

It must be VERY frustrating !

 

Cheers

[lovesthebeach2]

34 minutes ago, time4u2go said:

What you say makes sense, but as long as ships are sailing full, they have little reason to do anything about the negative comments.

I agree as long as ships are full they have no incentive, but most people sailing now may have booked months ago. It may catch up to them eventually, and if they’re reading any reviews, it shouldn’t surprise them. But I could be wrong and new cruisers have nothing to compare it to so they’re happy. 

[LobsterStalker]

4 minutes ago, lovesthebeach2 said:

I agree as long as ships are full they have no incentive, but most people sailing now may have booked months ago. It may catch up to them eventually, and if they’re reading any reviews, it shouldn’t surprise them. But I could be wrong and new cruisers have nothing to compare it to so they’re happy. 

And it may not . Keep in mind , A good portion of what you read on here are people's complaints and moanings . Many will not actually change anything because of it. I have stated that I am quite disappointed in the decline in the dining experience but so far that alone will not deter me from sailing.

If pricing keeps getting worse , that will be another story ,as I am always weighing value VS. product received .

It as always will be a wait and see as to whether it catches up to them.

 

Cheers

[topnole]

27 minutes ago, jencruzin said:

DH is ok but he feels the other guy might be just a slow person, so he told me to leave it be. He's looking up your pic in his cruise book. Thanks again.

You literally admit that you rolled your eyes at someone for not having your opinion.  Now you suggest I’m slow or a troll because I don’t buy into the idea that the other poster should just cave to your ridiculous notion that one should not complain about food and instead just be grateful to be able to cruise because the Navy makes that possible.  Talk about a better than thou attitude.  
 

News flash.  There have been millions and folks that have fought to defend this country.  Very few go around boasting about their time served and others needing to be grateful just because they did.  I have many friends who are former military and many family members as well.  I have great admiration for almost all of them.  Never experienced the eye rolling and insults towards others like from you or an attitude that we all need to be grateful to them.  
 

In fact, the ones who had it tough and really sacrificed never seem to talk about it at all and they certainly don’t preach about it.  They are the most humble.  
 

I’m not going to judge you beyond your comments.  But your comments are rude and condescending (eye rolling, calling others slow, calling them trolls).  No I’m not a troll.  But your navy food has zero to do with cruise ship food.  People are free to judge cruise food and even be ungrateful if they want.  Im for one am grateful, but I’m certainly not in for hearing that I should be by some stranger.  This is a cruise board. We don’t need lessons on when to be grateful for the military and get insulted if we suggest such lessons are uncalled for on such a forum.   You should really lighten up.  

[topnole]

On 4/10/2023 at 10:27 AM, GetToLivin said:

We were on Harmony in Nov and unfortunately, I do agree with OP that the food wasn't great (mainly ate in specialty, never the MDR). Did we go hungry? No. Did we return any dishes? No. Were we underwhelmed? Yeah.

 

It really does seem to vary from ship to ship because when we sailed Allure the following month, food was great, not one complaint (combo of CK and specialty).

I think this captures my feelings as well.  Definitely differences post Covid and more inconsistency.   With that said, the food isn’t inedible.  Just not as good as it used to be (or as consistent).