This was the first time I traveled on Celebrity cruise line. I have been on NCL and Princess before. Here are some opinions about this ship majorly based on food.
Actually, except food, I am pretty happy with this ship. But for me, going on a cruise, food is one of the most important things. This is a beautiful big new ship, nice clean stateroom, public area, a very nice in door swimming pool, friendly staffs etc. I like the bathroom a lot, so nice big and clean. Service was very good and thoughtful, especially every port, there were staffs stood at the entrance gave you ice water, punch and cold towels. I saw another ship Royal Caribbean didn’t have this service for their customers.
But you ask me if I would go on this ship again? The answer will be NO. Why? Because of the food. This ship has one main dinning room, and lots of special restaurants that you have to pay $40 cover charge per person. My husband and I ate at main dinning for supper every night, and couple times for lunch ( main dinning room didn’t open for port days which my other cruises’ main dinning rooms were all opened for port days).
Service was good if you find the right waiters. We used the selected dinning. So one night, we had waited 20 minutes for somebody brought us the bread, then about 40 minutes somebody came over to take our order after we complained about it. Next day we switched to another side of the dinning room, had great service with different waiters then.
Appetizers: Many of them didn’t taste that good, very plain. I normally just got one, cause nothing good on the menu. On other cruises before, I wanted to try all the appetizers on the menu cause they were so different. This ship uses the cheap food material to feed main dinning room customers. I especially remember one night, there was one appetizer called cured meat platter. If you know cured meat, you know these are the meat preserved or cured with salt such as prosciutto. But the platter l got, there was only one piece of prosciutto that you can call it cured meat, other five pieces are those really cheap processed lunchmeat, such as bologna, ham, the ones you can find in Subways’ $2 cold cut combo. Before on other ships, the cured meat platters I got were all those expensive Italian and Spanish cured meat that I usually buy from grocery stores. This ship really tried to be cheap on food in the main dinning room. Several appetizers that I got had too much rice for the base, if you eat whole thing, you will be filled up by the rice before you get your entrees.
Soup and salad: Soup were pretty bad except French onion soup you can order every time. I tried several daily different soups, none of them tasted that good, some of them actually I didn’t want to finish. So finally I had to have French Onion soups many times. Salads were not bad, but the Caesar salad on the everyday menu was really good flavor except the croutons were always tasted staled. So I always just ate everything in there except the croutons.
Entrees: The bread on this ship was very good, loved them, we always ate too much bread before our entrees came. Entrees were very boring, not that many things looked different and special that made you want to try. Couple nights I even didn’t know what to choose, cause I felt like I just had the same thing yesterday. Like different beef everyday, you feel they were pretty much in the same brown gravy. Not too much seafood on the dinner menu except some fish. One night, there was one seafood finally was not just fish. I ordered it, there were just 3 shrimps, one scallop and couple mussels on top of bunch of rice. You call this seafood entrée? The ship had lobster night the day before the last day. Plain broiled frozen lobster tails, not bad, not that good as fresh ones. Good thing was that you could ask them to put three lobster tails on your dish. Entrees were pretty normal taste, only one veal entrée I would say delicious and wrote home about it.
Deserts: deserts were not good on this ship at all. Several nights I had to skip it cause nothing on the menu was good. They only served soufflé one time that I had on other ships a lot. Many deserts I ordered I only had one bite cause the taste. Tiramisu they had one night was a joke, it was made from sponge cake, no lady fingers in there, and tasted pretty bad. I talked to their pastry chef, he told me they serve the real version tiramisu in their special restaurant. So don’t’ call those coffee flavored sponge cakes tiramisu then! Horrible ice cream on this ship, even the factory ice cream tastes much better than theirs. The best ice cream I had was on one of the Princess ships, best ice cream I had, so smooth and creamy, tasted just like those Italian ice cream, they made it everyday on the ship.
Lunch at the main dinning room was worse, I had to eat at buffet upstairs most of the time.
So main dinning room, if you like plain food, you probably will like it. But if you like trying different tasty food, and you love deserts, you will feel the same way I feel.
Now let’s talk about buffet: Ocianveiw Café was pretty good for breakfast. Lots of breakfast items, much more choice than the breakfast served at main dinning room. Wonderful pastries, croissants were great! So we ate most of breakfast in the buffet. But buffet’s orange juice was pretty bad, it tasted like half orange juice half water most of the time. Coffee was horrible! The worst coffee I had than everywhere I’ve had recent years. It tasted so bitter, burned and had really bad old coffee taste. I couldn’t even drink it, it tasted like it were filtered through the sewer pipe. You could smell the staled coffee smell when it was brewing. The self serve coffee you could get on the ship were all tasted like this. But I actually got good taste coffee in the main dinning room at dinner time.
Lunch at the buffet was normal but fresh everyday. I like it has Indian and Thai food stations. But the food were pretty much the same everyday except the hot entrees were changed a little bit, but not that much. Hot entrees were repeated a lot. Desserts at the buffet most of them were pretty bad, tasted and looked like those cheap buffet restaurant deserts, and they were repeated a lot, many items were there for at least 5 times. Supper at the buffet was amazingly not that much different than lunch buffet, some items actually were leftovers from lunch. Only one different was there was sushi at night. But the sushi sucked, you can get much better sushi than those even from you local cheap Chinese buffet. Maybe it’s good that supper at buffet was not good, so people could all go eat at main dinning room and get their money worth. One cruise I was on, their dinner buffet were so good. There were different themes every night, Italian night, Caribbean night , Mideast night etc. Tons of food to choose from, totally different from lunch, lots of special food belonged to the themes to eat that you can’t even get from main dinning room. Bad things were the buffet were so busy for dinner, many people gave up their main dinning for the buffet which I thought main dinning room was still the better choice. So I would get something I liked from the buffet before I ate at the main dinning room. But this ship, supper time, only a little bit people ate at the buffet.
Well, that’s it! For the food, I am not going on this ship again. My husband has been on Celebrity ship before, and he said it was way much better. And they even don’t have the snail dish( don’t know how to spell it), such a disappointment! The food I had on this ship was the worst. The cheap NCL cruise I took, their food was even better than this one. I don’t know if all other Celebrity ships are the same way now, but I will definitely try another cruise line next time.
