It was nice to go on an ocean cruise for the first time since early 2016 on the newest ship in the Princess fleet, the Discovery. After our luggage arrived we headed for the buffet to check it out. One major difference from our previous cruise is that we were no longer asked to use hand sanitizer before entering the dining room area. Now, you were requested to actually wash your hands at the conveinently located sinks before walking in. I think this was as much intended to deal with norovirus, as well as COVID and whatever else is going around. Correspondingly, when we got to the food, there was no self serve–everything was served by ship personnel, including drinks. Passengers who attempted to serve themsleves when there was no server at hand, were quickly admonished. However, about three days into the trip they abruptly went fully self serve. Not sure whether that had to do with reaching a point where there was unlikely to be any kind of outbreak while the cruise was in progress, to make it faster to get your food, or what. Another interesting change was the addition of purified water machines for people to fill up their own water bottles, extremely important when leaving the boat for an excursion. In the past, the cruise lines would try to sell you bottled water at exorbitant prices as you disembarked in port, and now they were giving the water for free. The water machines touted how many thousand plastic bottles were saved by the machine, so I guess being green was deemed to be more important that creating a revenue stream.
The food itself was a mixed bag, whether in the buffet, in the Juneau dining room, or in the Sabatini Italian specialty restaurant. For example, a couple of outstanding buffet items were the vanilla French toast and the salmon farfalle. On the other hand, there was little for me to eat at breakfast (no turkey sausage or similar low cholesterol breakfast items as were common on past cruises), and many dishes were too salty or too sweet. On the plus side, there were plenty of sugar free desserts at lunch and dinner. There was a theme every night at the dinner buffet (from Brazilian to Asian to American) which did not track what was served in the dining rooms.
Asian food in the buffet was largely bad, but the lo mein and Chinese egg noodle dishes were quite good. And everyday at noon they would have cook to order ramen, where the Asian passengers would line up in anticipation of the counter opening. The first time we had it, the ramen was quite good. The second time it wasn’t.
The pork chop suey was a blast from the past. Not a good blast though. Actually it bore no resemblance to the real (??) pork chop suey, as there were no bean sprouts.
One of the few items in the breakfast buffet I could eat was the salmon and other raw fish items.
Some items sounded more interesting than they turned out to be, such as the fish stew/bouillabase which was mostly shells.
The desserts in the buffet looked good, but they largely tasted the same. This cake extravaganza was impressive looking though.
Dining time in the Ketchikan, Skagway and Juneau dining rooms (a bit incongruous for a Mexican cruise, but the boat was built to visit Alaska) was completely flexible this time–you didn’t have to sit at the same table at the same time at dinner. Rather you would make a separate reservation for each dinner. On the plus side, this was a better to deal with varying daily schedules. On the other hand there was something nice about sitting next to the same people every dinner. Once again the food was a mixed bag with both good and bad dishes. This was a good chance to try duck a l'orange, a dish which I seldom eat.
There was a nice beef dish almost every night in the dining room, most of which were pretty good.
Escargot wasn't very good.
A nice dish was the veal scallopini.
Interestingly the ship had items both in the buffet and in the dining room which were seemingly in short supply back home, like this iceberg lettuce salad with bacon (lettuce $4.50 a head back home). Turkey, too.
The premium specialty dining at Sabatini Italian Restaurant was a clear upgrade from the dining room and clearly worth the $25 surcharge. This is the Stuzzichino Della Casa with tomato, bell pepper and prosciutto.
I generally don't like western style lamb, but the grilled lamb skewers were great.
Calamari was meh.
The cheddar cheese fondue with celery was salty and gruesome.
But the pear and celery salad was good.
Linguine with seafood was excellent.
As was the pappardelli beef.
Mediterranean seafood pouch wrapped in paper was interesting and fairly good.
Sole picatta was excellent.
Certainly this wasn't the best cruise food I've had, but you really can't complain about round the clock all you can eat.
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