Tag: teppanyaki

Seven Savory Eateries on Norwegian Bliss

With the biggest eating holiday of the year upon us, today seemed like a good day to write-up our dining experience on the Norwegian Bliss! Before we get there, however, I’ll point out that I’m only covering the specialty restaurants we chose to eat at, not any of the free options. We did eat at The Local, Taste, Savor and even the Manhattan Room one night, which were fine, but the specialties are what really stand out with the Norwegian Freestyle experience.

The topic of specialty restaurants sometimes sparks some lively discussion regarding the perception of nickel-and-diming by the various lines, and I have no illusion that some will be turned off by me only covering those here. As ships have gotten bigger, the number of specialty restaurants on board has grown too, giving the lines additional revenue opportunities. In the past we rarely ate at specialty restaurants, save for the occasional steakhouse on a special occasion, but those were few and far between. That all changed on our Norwegian Escape sailing three years ago when we decided to give some of the restaurants on that ship a shot, and we were not disappointed! With another sailing on Norwegian, purchasing a dining package was a no brainer for us. If you’re looking for ideas of places to try on the Bliss, read on!

Q Texas Smokehouse

This is one of the three places we chose to use our dining package on, and frankly I wasn’t sure what to expect since the reviews all seem rather mixed. After we were seated, the waitress came by and explained how things worked with the dining package, and I have to say, I was unprepared for what this would mean to my stomach. Before we get in to this, take a look at the menu located here. You get as many appetizers as you want, an entrée with as many sides as you want, along with a dessert. If you looked at the menu, keep in mind that you can get the Pitmaster Platter as your entree too!

As shown in the pics below, I started with the Deviled Eggs and Loaded Chips. For my entrée, the Beef and Pork Sausage Platter with corn on the cob and mac & cheese as my sides. Everything was delicious, especially the deviled eggs and sausage. By this point we were both stuffed, but knowing we still had a dessert menu to look at, we soldiered on. The decision really wasn’t that hard. Jen went with the Mason Jar Bread Pudding, and I chose the Bread Pudding w/Whiskey Sauce. Yowza they were good. This proved to be an excellent start to our dining experience on the Bliss!

Le Bistro

Night two brought us to the one place I was a bit apprehensive about, Le Bistro. I say that because I don’t really get too adventurous with food. I know what I like and I tend to stick to it, and knowing this was a French venue had me concerned that I’d have a hard time finding something I liked. Boy was I wrong!

We used the dining package for this one as well, and as before, the waitress said that we could choose more than one appetizer if we wanted to (menu for reference). I chose to only have one due to my aforementioned pickiness when it comes to eating. Frankly, I didn’t see anything in the list I really wanted, but chose to try the Gratiné A L’oignon (Onion Soup), and I was glad I did. I’m not a big soup fan and I don’t like onions, which should have been the death knoll of this choice, but it was outstanding! Following my delicious soup, it was entrée time! This was a bit easier, as I’m all about some filet mignon, so I went with the Filet de boeuf grillé. Again, excellent! Easily the best filet I’ve had on any ship we’ve sailed, and it was cooked to a perfect medium rare as ordered. Once we finished the entrées, it was time to choose our dessert. Jen chose the Chocolate Fondue for Two, and I went with the Profiteroles. Both were excellent, but I learned I need more profiteroles in my life. Those things were soooo good.

This restaurant is situated in a quiet nook on deck 16, and isn’t really a place you wear shorts and t-shirts to. If you’re looking for a nice quiet, romantic meal aboard the Bliss, this is where you want to go! I should also mention that the service in Le Bistro was some of the best we’ve experienced at any restaurant, land or sea. This is near the top of my all-time favorite shipboard eateries!

Teppanyaki

Night 3 brought us to one of the venues we’d been looking forward to since we booked this cruise, Teppanyaki, which was also the last restaurant on our dining package. As mentioned in the Escape post, this was one of the best Japanese steakhouses we’ve ever eaten at, so we were hoping the Bliss version of it would live up to that. Spoiler alert: It did! That garlic fried rice is some of the best out there, and once again, my filet mignon was cooked perfectly. As the chef doles out certain items like rice, he cooks extra in case anyone wants seconds. Jen and I took him up on that for rice, and somehow I got a lot of extra filet. A couple of minutes after serving me my helping of steak, he sent another round my way. What you see in the picture below is only the first helping. I had almost double that shortly after the picture was taken!

Excellent food, excellent service, and a great show from the chef left us happy with our choice once again. Teppanyaki is definitely a favorite of ours and one I highly recommend trying if you sail a Norwegian ship that has it!

Cagney’s Steakhouse

On the 4th night of our sailing, we were invited to Cagney’s as part of an industry-related meeting, so we were on someone else’s tab for this one :). We’d eaten here on the Escape and enjoyed it, but hadn’t planned to eat here until we got the invite. This is an easy one for me to find food I like, as I’m very much a meat and potatoes kinda guy.

Starting off, I went with the Pork Belly appetizer and Iceberg Wedge salad (menu for reference). Both were tasty, but those pork belly squares are a home run! For my appetizer, surprise, another filet! While it was cooked medium rare as ordered and tasty, the filets at Le Bistro and Teppanyaki were definitely better. This just seemed a little dry to me, so it was nice to have the chimichurry sauce to go with it.

The desserts here were pretty good, with my chocolate cake being really, really rich. One of the other people at our table got the warm brownie dessert, and I think we all wished we’d have gotten it after sampling it, super tasty!

Food Republic

After we sailed on the Escape, this was just below Teppanyaki as one of my all-time favorite restaurants on a ship, so I was very much looking forward to eating here on the Bliss. This one’s not part of the dining packages, it’s an a-la-cart fusion restaurant that combines various cooking styles and culinary traditions set in a venue that offers plentiful sea views. On the Escape, I really enjoyed the Wagyu bone-in rib-eye, and I was a little disappointed when I saw that wasn’t on the menu anymore, but my disappointment subsided as we started ordering. Here’s where I remind you that it’s a-la-cart, and the bill can add up pretty quickly as you start ordering things for yourself and things to share. I should also link to menus for this place (these are not my menu shots, sy the way): Handhelds/Sharables, Rice/Noodles/Grill, Drinks/Desserts. We did order more than we really needed, but it was really tasty and I’m pretty sure we finished everything. From the Korean Fried Chicken to the Peruvian Beef Skewers, Chicken Teriaki, Kimchi Fried Rice, ending with the Baklava, everything was delicious. To me, this is a must-visit on Norwegian ships that have it!

Los Lobos

We’d originally intended on using one of our three dining credits here, but got a last-minute industry invite, so this ended up being another one we didn’t have to pay for. Huge thank you to our hostess for the invite, we had a great time here!

Los Lobos sits at the back of the ship next to Cagney’s, and is considered upscale Mexican. Jen’s a taco lover, and I’m always up for a good burrito, and Los Lobos didn’t disappoint. I started things with one of their signature drinks, the Luna Margarita, which was excellent! The Burrito Rojo (which I ordered with ground beef) was quite delicious as well, as was the queso we had to dip our chips in to start things off. Unfortunately, all I have pictures of here are the margarita and burrito, as we were focused on the food and discussions around the table, and I forgot to snap the room or appetizers. Oh well, next time! Here’s the menu for reference too. If you’re in the mood for Mexican food, give Los Lobos a try!

Margaritaville

The final stop on our specialty dining tour was at Margaritaville. When we sailed the Escape in 2015, there was no additional charge for this venue, but that led to huge waits for seating, as mentioned in my past post. Shortly after that sailing, they instituted a small charge (compared to the cost of the other specialties) to eat here, $14.95/pp + 20% gratuity. We never noticed a wait or full seating here, so I’m not sure if the charge has taken things too far in the opposite direction, but we decided to eat here for lunch the day we were in Ensenada.

I tend to stick with the staples when we eat at Margaritaville, and this visit was no different, a Cheeseburger in Paradise followed by that signature Key Lime Pie for dessert (menu for reference). I also went with a watermelon margarita to drink, and while it was good, seemed a bit small for the price. I’ll also mention that this was the only venue we had service issues in. There were very few patrons in there while we ate, but our server still seemed overwhelmed, and things like refills proved fairly elusive. At one point we had to track down another server to get additional drinks, and later our bill. Questionable service aside, the food itself lived up to the Margaritaville name. I could really go for another slice of that key lime pie right about now!

That brings us to the end of our Norwegian Bliss specialty restaurant tour. With all of the paid restaurants we visited, we only ended up in the MDR one night, and while it was fine, I’d have been happy to visit any of the above venues again instead. Whatever your opinion of the specialty dining craze, I recommend giving any of these a try if you’re sailing a Norwegian ship that has them!

Credit to EatSleepCruise and CruiseCritic for the menu pictures I’ve been linking to.

 

 

MSC Seaside: The Food!

Having been forced to eat non-cruise food for almost a week now, I figured it was time to go back and relive everything we had to eat on the MSC Seaside. In my ‘initial thoughts‘ post I talked about the service issues we encountered in the MDR and at the buffet, so I’ll skip those here and focus on the food itself. I’ll be starting with the buffet food and working my way up to the Teppanyaki specialty restaurant, so stick around and enjoy all of the pictures along the way!

When I think of an MSC buffet, the first thing that comes to mind is the pizza. Oh that glorious pizza. It’s one thing I really look forward to when we set foot on an MSC ship, so the Seaside had a lot to live up to. I’ll just say she didn’t disappoint, and I was happy to enjoy the buffet pizza more than once. It felt slightly thinner than the buffet pizza on the Divina, which is fine with me, but in the taste department, I was completely satisfied. The other thing I liked, something else I mentioned in the initial thoughts post, is that there are multiple pizza stations in the main buffet on deck 8, and when the buffet was full of people, I don’t recall a single instance of having to wait for a slice of pepperoni, they seemed to be keeping up with demand just fine.

The rest of the buffet was actually pretty good, at least what I had, with one exception, the bacon. For whatever reason, most of the time I got bacon in the morning, it was fairly flavorless. I’m not really sure how you can do that, but when I’d find warm, crispy bacon, it just had no flavor to it. One morning I tried some softer, slightly less cooked bacon, and it had a decent flavor to it, but for whatever reason, anything resembling crispy bacon had none. Outside of that, I enjoyed the buffet, and once I discovered the soft warm pretzels, I was in heaven:

The last day we also found some corn dogs up on the smaller deck 16 buffet, and they were pretty tasty. I think you see where I’m going with my buffet choices here, I basically eat like a kid in there :). That falls in line with one tip I posted early on, they have delicious fries, and some pretty good mac and cheese (only found the mac and cheese on 16 though), and when you combine them, you get total deliciousness:

One other thing to mention with the buffet is the ice cream. If you’re looking for a soft-serve machine, save yourself some time and head up to the deck 16 buffet. It appears (unless I missed others) that the only soft-serve machine on the ship is located in the ‘family & kids’ section up here. The nice lady behind the counter was quick to get everyone cones, so it’s not a big deal, just don’t forget about it if you want ice cream:

While I’m talking about ice cream, let’s also talk about the gelato. The Aurea experience includes the non-premium unlimited drinks package. That drink package includes gelato! Did we take advantage of that? Heck yea! Even on the 2-day sailing we made stops at gelato stands pretty often. Their gelato is soooo tasty, it’s worth at least one try. It’s offered in cups, cones, shake, and even in bar form. I absolutely loved the bars (lemon and dark chocolate were my favorites), but during the Christmas sailing they were hard to come by, as the gelato stands were having a hard time keeping it in stock, as this stuff is all made fresh. Regardless, my goal of at least one cup/bar of gelato every single day was met, and I enjoyed all of them. There are multiple places to get gelato on the Seaside, be sure to try them all!

Next up, the MDR! As Aurea guests, we were assigned any-time dining in Seashore restaurant on deck 5 aft. For this sailing, the starboard half of the restaurant seemed to be reserved for Aurea and Wellness any-time passengers. You enter the MDR down a little side corridor on the starboard side, are greeted by a very friendly hostess who then takes you to an open table fit for a party of your size. I don’t think we ever had to wait to be seated more than 5 minutes on any night. I should note that we also ate here for lunch twice, and like any cruise ship MDR at lunch, you just walk in the main entrance, tell them how many people you have, and they seat you pretty quickly.

As far as the food, I’d say pretty good! The various pastas and lasagna were easily the best in my opinion, but everything else I had was good too, except for the Philly cheesesteak I had in there for lunch one day. The bread was fine, but the meat and cheese just weren’t up to snuff in my opinion. Jen had some short ribs one night she wasn’t a big fan of as they were overcooked, but outside of that, I think we were all pretty happy with our food choices. The menus themselves usually had a decent variety, save for the holiday and elegant menus, which didn’t offer the ‘classic menu’ options, the things you can get any night if that night’s choices didn’t appeal to you. Here’s a sampling of the menus, along with some of the items we had:

Snickers Cake. So yummy!
Holiday menu
Holiday menu
Ricotta-stuffed ravioli
Applewood-smoked bacon wrapped filet mignon
Traditional Christmas turkey
Holiday yule log
Brownie stack. Mmmmmm 🙂
Red velvet cake
Italian antipasto
Lasagna bolognese
Lemon delight
Rigatoni meatballs
Baked Alaska
Arancini Messina-style
Beef tournedos
Chocolate lava cake. So much goo 🙂

Last but certainly not least, let’s talk about the specialty restaurants! While I wish we’d have also tried the steakhouse, we only ended up going to the Teppanyaki restaurant, which is one of the three venues in the Asian Market Kitchen by Roy Yamaguchi. I mentioned in my ‘5 things we’re excited for‘ post that I was really looking forward to eating here, which we did for lunch on Christmas eve, and it did not disappoint in any way. We also got a small sampling of it during the two day inaugural, and while the food we sampled was excellent, nothing prepared me for how good the entire experience would be.

We had a noon reservation, and once seated, realized we were the only ones in the place. Not sure if people didn’t realize you could eat here for lunch right away, didn’t realize it existed, or simply didn’t want to pay the premium, but it was kinda cool to have our chef and the staff in there all to ourselves, at least for a while, as another family did show up ~12:45, followed by a group of officers around 1:00. Everyone working in here was excellent, starting with the wait staff all the way up to the chefs who made our food. They were very accommodating on some changes to the menu Bayley and I asked about, namely subbing chicken in place of the salmon and noodles in place of the sushi on the set course we were ordering, which is the “Sencho” option on the menus below (click a page to see it larger)

Every single thing I ate here was delicious, and our chef was outstanding, making each course at a perfect pace, and cooking everything exactly as it should have been. I’ve mentioned in past blog posts that I’m not a shrimp/seafood guy, but I decided to give those huge shrimp a try, and was not disappointed, I started questioning whether I should be avoiding shrimp at all! The chicken he made us was also really, really good, and cooked perfectly. By the time it came to the filet I was ready for a little red meat, and it too was outstanding, cooked exactly as I’d requested. He also cooked some of the best noodles and rice of any Teppanyaki-style place we’ve been to in my opinion. Again, everything that hit my plate was delicious. I highly recommend giving this place a try if you’re on the Seaside and looking for something outside the normal MDR experience one night. You won’t be disappointed!

All in all, we were pretty happy with the food we had all week. I’m no foodie, and Jen likes to claim that Bayley and I only eat yellow food, so your experience might vary, but for me, I could spend another week on this ship eating what it has to offer and be totally satisfied! Next time, maybe we’ll spend the week eating at a different specialty restaurant each day, or maybe we’ll just eat Teppanyaki each night 🙂

 

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!

 

Five Delicious Eateries on the Norwegian Escape

The Norwegian Escape boasts 28 possible places to fill your belly as part of their whole Freestyle cruising setup. Being that there was no standard MDR with assigned dining times, we decided to give a few specialty restaurants a try, and pre-purchased the 3 meal dining package. Prior to this, I think we’ve only eaten in two or three specialties on all of our past cruises, so this was a big change for us. When it was all over, we hit 12 different restaurants over the course of this trip, including the free options and Supper Club.

We spent a bit of time trying to decide where to eat on the dining package, and after some back and forth finally settled on Teppanyaki, Moderno Churrascaria, and La Cucina. We set up reservations for all three ahead of time out of concern for seating availability once we got on board, as we only had certain nights available due to our conference schedule.

So how was the food? Honestly, it was all really good, which I wasn’t expecting. This is all going probably to come off sounding like I’m trying to suck up to NCL, but I mean every word of it. If we didn’t like something, I’d be more than happy to call it out, like I keep doing with the Supper Club. I truly left the ship amazed at how good these five restaurants were. Let’s take a quick look at the pay restaurants we ate at, in the order we dined there:

Teppanyaki: We love Japanese steakhouses. The ones we usually eat at are mostly chains (Kabutos, Nakato, Benihana), with our favorite being Kabutos. This blew those away. Absolutely delicious from start to finish. Service was great, the food was great, and our chef did an outstanding job. It really set the bar for the rest of the cruise in all apsects, as it was the first real meal we had on board. I had the filet and green tea cake. The fruit pic is my wife’s dessert, which the menu claimed to be exotic fruits. She liked it, but didn’t really feel it was all that exotic. Regardless, we left quite happy. One thing to note here, you never run out of rice. They cook enough for everyone to have at least two servings, so you can ask the chef at any time for more, as it’s sitting there on the grill staying warm throughout your meal. Another thing on the rice, they grill it up with garlic and butter, something we’ve never seen in this food genre. As my wife put it: I didn’t think fried rice could be improved, but I was wrong. The rice is amazing!

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Food Republic: We decided to eat here on a whim on night three. We hadn’t planned to pay for any food above the three we’d already booked, but it was well worth it. You order everything on an iPad at your table instead of the traditional server-based ordering, and the food itself was outstanding. Jen had chicken skewers and sushi (don’t recall specifics on that, unfortunately) and she really liked it. I had the 18oz Wagyu bone-in rib eye and it was some of the best meat I had all week, and was perfect with the chimichurri sauce that came on the side, although it stood on its own just fine too. As shown in the picture (which I wish was better quality), it arrived pre-cut, and every piece was perfectly cooked. If you only eat at one specialty on the Escape, this one should be at the top of your list. As shown, we had a window seat and ate as the sun set, which made the experience that much better.

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Cagney’s Steakhouse: Again, not on our original list, but we totally backed in to this one. Some friends or ours, also fellow agents, had been invited here by one of the NCL execs, Alex Pinelo, and they were able to invite two other couples along, with us being one of them, which we appreciated very much. We can’t thank him enough for the hospitality, and I have to say that the food, wine, and service was excellent! One of the best ship-board steakhouses we’ve eaten at, with our filet being perfectly cooked all the way through. Didn’t hurt that this happened on my birthday, so added bonus for me! We both had the baked potato soup and the 8oz filet. I had mac and cheese as my side (that was just okay) and the yummy chocolate cake for dessert, while Jen had the apple crisp. I think my only issue is how long it all took. Start to finish, I think we were there for more than two and a half hours, possibly three. I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth though, it was an excellent evening.

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Moderno Churrascaria: I love a good Brazilian steakhouse, so this was mostly my choice. Any place where people keep coming by my table with meat is good by me. I don’t remember a lot about the salad bar, other than there being plenty of choices, so I’ll go straight to the meat. My favorite was probably the signature steak, which if I recall was some sort of flank cut. Really, really good. The sausage was also a favorite of mine. Mmmmm. In addition to the signature, my wife’s other favorite was the grilled pineapple, which was also popular with both tables around us. The only filet I had was the well done one as it turned out, but by the time I realized it I was too full to try the medium version unfortunately. That was the only issue I had all night, and only an issue because I wasn’t paying attention when he said it was well done. All in all a really good night, and as usual I left the green button up way too long :). The plate of meat you see was shot right after I realized that and flipped the card to red. The dessert is a delicious cake they brought me for my birthday, which could easily have been shared with three to four people.

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La Cucina: We ate here on our last night, and scored a table outside. If the weather is right, this is definitely the way to go, the ambiance outside is outstanding. Eating a good meal out on a nice quiet deck at night? Yes please! We both had the meat lasagna, and agreed it was excellent. There’s a place near us (Arooji’s Wine Room) that has some of the best lasagna I’ve ever eaten, and La Cucina beat that. Hard to do, in my opinion.  I’d definitely eat here again, especially if we could sit outside. We both had the beef carpaccio in addition to the aforementioned lasagna. I had the chocolate torte for dessert, while Jen had the lemon curd ricotta cheesecake. That chocolate torte was super rich, but I powered through and finished it 🙂

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That about covers the pay restaurants we ate at. As mentioned in the last post, all of the other restaurants we ate at (Taste, Savor, Margaritaville, Manhattan Room, O’Sheehan’s, Garden Cafe buffet) were good too, with the notable exception of the disappointing food in the Supper Club for the Brat Pack show. We were very happy to see that Norwegian’s put some effort into improving the quality of the food on board, it’s definitely paying off. If anyone has specific questions on any of the dining venues we ate at, feel free to ask in the comments!

Full disclosure: I’m very much a meat and potatoes guy, and in no way claim to be a foodie, so YMMV 🙂

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