Thus far we’ve been quite happy with our main dining room experience aboard Coral Princess - good variety, presentation, and taste - in both lunch and dinner seatings. But there are other places aboard to eat so we’ve been exploring over the past several days.
First off, there is the Horizon Court buffet - I have eaten there for two breakfasts and one lunch so far. From my perspective, I haven’t had a meal I cared for - food was pedestrian, rarely warm enough, and almost completely lacking in visual and taste appeal. Just so you don’t think I’m a food snob, this is the first buffet in the last two years aboard five ships on three cruise lines (including another Princess ship 3 months ago) I haven’t been able to find something I liked thus far. I ate Army, Air Force, and Navy chow in various places for a number of years and the buffet experience on Coral Princess has reminded me of those days once more. Hopefully, I’ll find a redeeming meal in the Horizon over the next 5 days of our cruise.
Next up, Sabatini’s Italian Restaurant, an upscale restaurant serving individual pizzas at lunch time (free of charge) and offering a full Italian menu for dinner ($25 charge per person). We were really looking forward to eating in Sabatini’s after our Jan 2016 cruise aboard Emerald Princess and finding Sabatini’s replaced by “Share by Curtis Stone”. You can read about that culinary disaster in an earlier post. Unfortunately, our experience in Sabatini’s while not disastrous, was not what we expected. Why? The food was visually wonderful as these pictures will attest. But the taste, particularly the pasta we selected, was not close to what we’ve experienced in the Main Dining Room thus far - bland and lacking in character. The burrata appetizer sounded great but was unlike any burrata we’ve ever eaten and we know what burrata is supposed to look and taste like having lived in Italy for 2.5 years.
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| Grilled Vegetables in Sabatini's |
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| It looks awesome but bland |
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| Burrata(?) in Sabatini's |
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| Great Looking Food |
The highlight of our dinner in Sabatini’s was the 2012 Barolo accompanying our dinner - price point of $45 was reasonable - and right on the number of our Gold Wine package (10 bottles for $330 - price range of $30-45 per bottle). If you don’t get a free beverage package with your cruise and you are a wino, the Princess wine packages are a good value especially since they offer good wines at reasonable prices within the package price ranges.
Bottom line, would we go back to Sabatini’s again and pay $25 each for dinner? No - the main dining room hasn’t let us down yet.
Conversely, Sabatini’s for pizza lunch is a pleasant surprise and a very nice, quiet place to spend a lunch eating pretty decent pizza with a craft beer (love that about Princess) or glass of wine. There is no charge for the pizza and they are cooked to order in individual sizes. We’d definitely recommend this as a change of pace for lunch.
The Grill on Deck 15 provides hot dogs, hamburgers and the like for a quick bite around the pool. We have eaten there once for lunch and ordered two cheese burgers with fries. They are assembled to order not cooked to order and there is a big difference between the two. The cheese is barely melted having been placed on a pre-cooked patty and the buns have not been grilled — if you can follow the theme our recommendation would be try it if you are sitting at the pool and want a quick bite — if you have got a few more minutes, you might get something better in Horizon Cafe which is about 50’ farther forward.
We haven’t tried Bayou Cafe for lunch (Pub Food on sea days) or dinner yet but we can’t wait to try it and report back.
One of the things we did on our second sea day was the Maitre’D wine tasting. The Maitre’D tasting is a higher end tasting than the Grapevine tasting later in our cruise - and includes several bottles between $60 and $100 retail price. We tasted 6 wines - three white and three red - with a nice selection of canapés to help cleanse and sharpen our palate. Geographically speaking, California, South Africa, France, and Italy were represented. At the end of the tasting, we were offered the opportunity to buy three of the reds in a package for ~$140 - considering that the retail price of the three totaled $200, this would have been a nice discount if we had really liked the wines themselves. But that is the beauty of wine, wine tasting, and evidence that if you drink enough wine, you will really know what you like (or don’t) when you try them. The wines we have chosen ourselves each night - Estancia Meritage, a Barolo, and a Simi Landslide Cabernet - are all tastier to us than what we had during the tasting and priced between $36 and $46 on the Princess wine menu.
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