TRAVEL THERE: BEST RESTAURANT ON BOARD
The presence of multiple dining opportunities you don’t have to pay extra for was nice and seems to be the going trend on cruises, but I still like traditional cruise dining, where you are assigned to a table and a time for the duration. We’ve tried the specialty dining you have to pay for and found it to be much ado (and expense) about nothing. The Celebrity selection of complimentary (as if anything were actually complimentary on a cruise) restaurants was nice and the staff was wonderful, but it just wasn’t the same as having your own table and your own waiter for the duration.
The Menus
In each restaurant the menu is divided up into three sections. The first selection of meals are specific to that particular restaurant. As far as I was concerned, they could have done away with the other two sections and expanded this one. During our first visit to a restaurant, we’d select our favorites from this specialty menu, but when you returned to that restaurant, the menu had not changed. You’d already had your favorite choice and the others might be items you have no interest in. So for me, this was a fail.
The second section is Celebrity Classics – meals Celebrity serves across their fleet. The third section featured dishes specific to the Edge, but available to all the restaurants. I still would have preferred to have an extended choice in the specialty section. If they wanted to offer options, then the Celebrity Classics would have fit the bill. The other choices were unnecessary, in my opinion.
Cyprus – Greek Seafood
We loved the Cyprus Restaurant. Greek food is a favorite with us, as is seafood, so how could we lose. Well, a bow renewal bride-to-be can be having a well-served case of pre-wedding jitters, but we’ve already covered that.
Our whole crew had dinner together this evening. We figured out how our wine programs were going to work and made our way through the menus. I chose the moussaka as an appetizer. It’s usually an entree choice, but the Cyprus version is a very small serving, so it would not do as entree. This is perhaps the best dish I had on board.
For an entree I had sea bass and it was delicious. The dessert was another disappointment. We discovered the buffet had amazing desserts, but the restaurant desserts were disappointing, every single time. By the end of the cruise, we were having all our desserts in the buffet. This particular meal had some kind of fuzzy chocolate thing with blueberries. Downright weird.
We were very impressed with the way the Wine by the Bottle program worked, even if we were a little disappointed in the wine selection. You could have as many bottles going as you wanted and they were available to you wherever you were on the ship. We never tried to access them in a bar, but it worked well at whatever restaurant we landed in. The Bagleys paid extra to get the premium wine choices and I couldn’t tell that their choices were any better than our standard program had.
After dinner we all went our separate ways. Bill wanted to see what the entertainment was like. The highlight show that evening was a tribute to Whitney Houston. We’d just watched a documentary on Whitney Houston and while she was certainly a musical virtuoso, I walked away from it disappointed in the life she lived. Unfortunately, the artist covering Whitney’s songs didn’t deserve much praise for her singing either. She was a pretty good singer, but not good enough to attempt Whitney’s signature songs.
From there we checked out a performance in Eden. It was a couple doing gentle covers of Beatle love ballads. They weren’t too bad, but it was late and the music put us to sleep. Time to call this one a day! We arrive in Naples next week, so don’t miss it!
jane sadek 