Tag: oasis class

Good Eats on Harmony of the Seas!

Harmony of the Seas is a huge ship, but I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. One of the things that comes with that size is a plethora of eating options. You can always stick to the included choices, like the main dining rooms or Windjamer buffet, but where’s the fun in that? We’ve come to enjoy trying some of the specialty options on ships, and this trip would be no exception. After evaluating our options before the cruise, we ended up booking two ahead of time, and spontaneously stopped at another for lunch the last day on board. So where all did we eat? Were we happy with our choices? Read on!

First stop, Wonderland! While I was excited to try something new, I admit to being a little concerned about my food options. I’m a very picky eater, and extremely picky when it comes to anything seafood. Picky like I generally don’t eat any. Our trip to Norway this past March was the first time I’d really eaten any fish in over 20 years, and while I did enjoy that, the items I was seeing on the Wonderland menu had me a bit concerned. Once again, the concerns were unfounded, as everything I had was excellent, even the seafood!

Once you’re seated, your waiter brings you menus, which is to say a picture frame with an empty menu and a paint brush. After dipping your brush in the “paint” (water), you slowly drag it across the blank paper, which in turn reveals your menu:

Once it’s fully visible, your waiter explains the process to you and begins to ask you questions around food preference. Once he or she has all the information they need, they tell you that they’ll use that to pick out items from the menu they think you will like the most. In my case, that was a lot of “trust me, I promise you’ll enjoy this”, and he wasn’t wrong! List of items we ate prior to dessert:

  • Buffalo Chicken Eggs
  • Shrimp Kataifi
  • Crispy Crab Cones
  • Sashimi of Red and White Tuna
  • Liquid Lobster
  • Terroir Beef
  • Berkshire Pork Belly

The only thing I didn’t eat, much to Jen’s delight, was the Sashimi. I’m definitely not a raw fish fan, so I let her have all of that, which she really enjoyed. Honestly, everything I listed above was amazing. My favorites were probably the buffalo chicken eggs and pork belly, but I’d eat it all again. Also, the presentation on a couple of things is pretty cool too, starting with buffalo chicken eggs:

Another nice thing about the food, you don’t end up stuffed before dessert. The only portions that were big were the pork and beef, but everything before it consisted of small enough portions to not fill us up.

After all of that was cleared away, the real fun began. Our waiter brought us two desserts:

  • Forbidden apple: Raspberry cremeux, brown butter crumble, yogurt ice cream
  • The World: Peanut butter ganache, Valrhona chocolate mousse, salted caramel ice cream

The first one was fine, presented as a sliced apple with filling inside, but was easily overshadowed by The World:

The video doesn’t even come close to doing it justice, but yes, that’s hot caramel being poured over the chocolate, which then melts around the peanut butter ganache. Awesome presentation, amazing taste. Frankly, I could have gone back every night for that alone!

We had an awesome time at Wonderland, enjoyed everything we ate, and had outstanding service start to finish. The only gripe, if you can call it that, is that we were never really given a chance to request a specific item or two off the menu, but that’s a pretty small issue and didn’t detract from the experience. If you get the chance, I’d highly recommend giving this place a try!

Next up, Izumi! We love a good Japanese steakhouse, and weren’t going to miss the opportunity to try one on Harmony. Going in to this, my gold standard for ship-board restaurants of this style was Teppanyaki aboard the Norwegian Escape, as we absolutely loved our meal there two years ago. Great food, great service, what more can you ask for?

From start to finish, the service in Izumi was excellent. Our waiter did an awesome job keeping up with the table, was fun to talk to, and even took slow-mo video of people while the chef was tossing food in our direction. The chef was excellent as well, putting on a fun show for us while cooking everything up perfectly. I went with the filet mignon, as I usually do, and every bite tasted amazing. Unlike many of the Japanese steakhouses in the US, they didn’t have what many refer to as Japanese ketchup (aka Yum Yum sauce), which was a bit disconcerting to me at first, as I admittedly love that stuff. No matter, once I started eating, I completely forgot about that due to how good everything tasted!

We left quite happy with this choice as well, another I’d highly recommend trying if you’re sailing Harmony!

Finally, Johnny Rockets! We’d eaten here on the Oasis last year, and while I love a good greasy burger, we’d gone in to this cruise not really planning to eat here this trip, mainly due to our schedule. That changed, however, when we realized that Boardwalk Balcony rooms include a credit for 4 meals here, so we figured why not! We did find it hard to carve out time with all of the stuff we had going on, but finally managed to squeeze it in for lunch on our last sea day. The downside of a conference at sea with set session schedules is that you suddenly have around 1000 agents heading to lunch at the same time, so we hurried over as soon as our general session got out and managed to get a table before the crowd hit!

My only gripe is that service here can be hit or miss. Our server was very friendly, but just seemed overworked a bit, so things like refills were a bit slow, but still, it’s Johnny Rockets at sea, and having a Rocket Double sitting in front of me, along with some tasty bacon cheese fries kept a smile on my face 🙂

We did indulge in shakes as well. We were originally going to split one, but were kindly reminded by our server that Crown and Anchor members have BOGO shake credits on their SeaPass cards, so why not get two! I was pretty glad we ended up finding time to get here, I do love a good Rocket Double, and it was a nice change of pace from the MDR’s lunch food, which is all we’d had time for up to that point.

That about covers our specialty restaurant adventures on the Harmony of the Seas. As you can tell, we have no regrets on any of it! Royal Caribbean’s food rarely disappoints!

 

Good Times on Harmony of the Seas!

Another year, another national conference in the books! As I’ve mentioned in the past, our parent company holds our national conference at sea each year, and we were fortunate to attend for the 3rd year in a row, with this one being the Halloween sailing on Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas. Being that we were busy with sessions and other business-related events most of the week, we didn’t get to enjoy everything the ship has to offer, but it was still an awesome cruise nonetheless! If you happened to catch my Oasis of the Seas series last year, you might have noticed that I was a little disappointed in aspects of that sailing. Going in to this trip, that experience was forefront in my mind, but I’m happy to say that this trip exceeded my expectations in just about every area.

I’m still not a fan of the layout of the port itself, as we decided to park right at the ship and had to wait in a rather long line of cars to get in to the lot due to some pretty poor traffic management, but once we were in, everything else was cake. Embarkation went even faster than last time! Once we got past security, we headed up to the desk to check in. With no line, we got up there immediately and were checked in pretty quickly. Walking up to the waiting area, we found that they were already boarding, and had no wait here either. We basically walked in to the building, checked in, and headed right on to the ship. Start to finish, everything took maybe 15 minutes after we parked. It always amazes me how fast they are able to board a ship of this size!

Royal Caribbean set the bar really high all week in how they treated our group, and day 1 was no exception. They blocked off the Silk dining room for us to grab food after boarding, knowing that we needed to eat pretty quickly so we could drop our stuff in our rooms and head to our first general session. Frankly, they took good care of us all week, especially at the parties they hosted for us. Take the first night, for example. We were in the skating rink, Studio B, and they laid out an amazing spread of food, drink and ice sculptures!

They went all out on our Halloween party, too. I feel kinda bad for the rest of the passengers, as Royal closed the boardwalk that night for a few hours to host our party, and once again, it was well catered and an absolute blast. Oh, and yes, we brought our costumes! Frankly, I was surprised at how many people on the ship brought theirs, too. We walked through the promenade a few times after our party, and there were a lot of people dressed for the occasion! It was fun walking through in costume, too, we had a number of people stop us for pictures and selfies, which was really fun!

Royal also hosted a beach party on Labadee’s Adrenaline Beach for us too, which was awesome. Free Labadoozies, fun competitions, and beach time, what could be better? Oh, right, a trip down Dragons’ Breath Flight Line! That last one we paid for, but having done it on our Oasis trip, Jen and I both were excited to try it again! Last time we did this I had my GoPro with me and got some decent (but shaky) video, but this time around I had my new toy, a Garmin Virb 360. I like this footage a lot more than the GoPro, as you can use a VR headset or something simple like Google Cardboard to watch it in a VR-like mode and fully immerse yourself in it. Don’t have those? Well not to worry, you can still watch it on YouTube in a normal way and drag around the video to see it from every angle! It’s also now a featured video on one of the major VR platforms, Veer VR! Check it out, and be sure to move around and see all of the action around me, not just the forward view!

Moving on, let’s talk about our room. We again had a boardwalk balcony, which I wasn’t a huge fan of last time, as I found the balcony fairly useless outside of aqua shows, due to the boardwalk acting as a trap for the heat and humidity during the time of our sailing (mid-May). This time around we did find it more useful, as it wasn’t quite as hot outside on this sailing. I used it a few times, including once where I hung out there in my wolf mask for a little bit just to mess with people :). The room itself had plenty of space for us and was very comfortable, and this time around came with a couple of really nice boardwalk balcony amenities: The Royal Refreshment soda package, and a 4-person credit to Johnny Rockets. Those are definitely nice additions to the room category!

Moving on to the internet speed, I was pleasantly surprised. On last year’s sailing, I was pretty disappointed in the overall speed and reliability of the Voom offering, and wasn’t sure what to expect this time around, since they had given all conference attendees the fastest package, which meant that in addition to the regular passengers that would be using the internet, there were 1,000 for sure that had would be on it constantly too. Outside of a couple of small outages (WiFi hotspots totally disappeared from device view), it was pretty reliable and fairly quick. I also really like the unlimited packages, as I hate having to worry about the amount of time I use. It’s not so bad when uploading pictures, but when attempting to upload video, you have to hope things are moving quickly, otherwise you burn a bunch of time off your plan. Not on Voom, however! I ran a couple of speed tests during the week just to see how it looked, so here’s one taken around noon on a sea day, which should have represented a peak time:

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One of the other cool things we got to take advantage of on this sailing is their huge dry slide, the Ultimate Abyss. This was new to us, as Oasis doesn’t have it, and is exactly what it sounds like, a long dry slide at the back of the ship that starts on deck 16 and takes you down to the boardwalk on deck 6. We did this pretty early in the sailing, and while we enjoyed it, didn’t really feel the need to do it again. Note that you really do need to pay attention to their instructions, as you can easily turn the wrong way, lift a leg wrong, etc, and end up rubbing some skin off on the way down. I chatted with another agent that took some skin off one leg that way, and he’d seen a kid on the ship who had taken some skin off an arm by hitting the side on the way down. It’s fun, just follow their instructions and you’ll be fine! Since you’re not allowed to take GoPros on this (or the water slides, both of which were pretty disappointing) I don’t have any video, but here are a couple of pics of the Abyss instead. In the second one, you can see the two slides spiral down near the back of the ship:

Even though we were there for work, we did catch as many shows as possible. Frankly, Royal’s really stepped up their entertainment game over the years, and have some of the best shows available at sea in my opinion. We caught 1887, Columbus, The Fine Line, and Jen caught Grease, and every one of them were amazing. I really enjoyed Columbus and The Fine Line. The latter is one of the shows held in the Aqua Theater, and incorporates a lot more in the way of artsy visual elements than the traditional aqua show we’d seen on Oasis. I can’t recommend it enough!

Let’s end this by covering a few of the negatives I called out last year in my final Oasis post, as well as one or two other things called out in various posts from that sailing:

Windjammer: Maybe I’m completely mis-remembering the Oasis, but I swear that Harmony’s buffet area is bigger. We ate there a few times and it never felt as crowded as it did on Oasis. I do really like their buffet food too, some of the best of the lines we’ve sailed.

Coke Freestyle machines: I think we had an issue once all week. Last time they were constantly down/being repaired, but this time around we had no major issues with them.

Lack of water slides: We were a little disappointed last year that Oasis had none, but happy to see that had been rectified on Harmony. We both tried them after getting back on the ship in port one day and had a blast. They’ve got two slides dedicated to racing each other, which are pretty standard (but fast) waterslides, and then next to those is The Perfect Storm, a slide with several clear sections that ends up dumping you into a large bowl near the end. Fun stuff, I just wish they allowed you to take a GoPro to film it!

Overall, we had a really great week, and were treated very well by the Harmony’s crew. Next year’s conference is aboard the Norwegian Bliss out of Long Beach, and I have to say, Royal set a very high bar as a conference host, so I hope NCL was paying attention!

I do have one more post in this series covering the food we enjoyed aboard the Harmony, which I hope to have up in a few days. Thank you for following along!

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