Chew on This: Tips for Getting the Best Meal on the Sky Princess

A friend remembers that at his parents’ dinner party in the ‘60s, the talk was about cruising. But not the beauty of the sea or the allure of the ports – it was all about the food.

A sweet finish to a meal at The Catch

Have things changed, really? Of course, today we have bumper cars and bowling alleys, but who among us doesn’t care about the chow? In fact, we obsess endlessly about lobster tails, whether to spring for specialty dining and if waiters will actually serve us coffee in the buffet.

And after all, we’re spending thousands of dollars for the privilege of eating to our tummies’ content. So, with this in mind, I’ve assembled some tips on how you can get the best meal on your upcoming voyage on the Sky Princess:

Before You Go

Plan Your Palate – A real plus today is that we have many more choices for where we can consume our calories – main dining room (MDR), buffet, specialty restaurants, casualty eateries, poolside grills and snack shops, as well as room service. Princess offers traditional MDR seating, as well as anytime dining with reservations or without. You will need to make a selection when you book.

Package Your Pleasure – For the greatest choice, consider the Premier package. Princess’ top bells-and-whistles offering will set you back an extra $100 per person/per day (more if you wait to buy it onboard), but it’s a great value, given all that’s included, such as unlimited specialty dining (as well as casualty dining and room service, unlimited alcohol, wi-fi, gratuities and more). We took full advantage of the package, eating in specialty restaurants four times on an eight-day trip.

Your Best Meal is a Phone Call Away – After you make final payment, make specialty dining reservations a soon as possible through Princess’ dedicated Dine Line (1-833-805-DINE), as the restaurants fill up fast. (You can also use it to make reservations in the MDR.) Also, note that if you’re a Captain’s Circle Elite or Platinum, you can book specialty dining even before final payment is made.

On the Cruise

The highlight of an MDR dinner

Didn’t get in? Don’t despair – If you forget to make specialty reservations before you leave home, if you’re flexible, you may be able to get them on embarkation day, or even well into the trip. Sometimes, reservations are cancelled or there are no-shows. For example, we were able to snag an available slot at a specialty restaurant mid-voyage by visiting the restaurant.  

Know where you’re eating – Location of a restaurant can really matter. During our highly anticipated meal at The Catch specialty restaurant, which is located off the piazza, a song contest was underway. A large crowd screamed and cheered all the way through our meal. So, if a romantic dinner is your goal, you might want to check the restaurant’s location and the scheduled entertainment. (Note that when we ate there a few nights later, thankfully, a mellow folk guitarist was the featured performer.)

Main dining do’s – One formal night, we ended up at the MDR at 8:30 p.m. – just 30 minutes before
closing. We were shocked that it turned out to be one of the fastest dinners we’ve had in an MDR – 1 hour and 15 minutes, from soup to dessert. It might not be your first choice to eat that late, but perhaps the key to a speedy meal. 

Afternoon fare at the International Cafe

The International Café: A 24/7 Treat – The International Café is the best round-the-clock snack shop I’ve seen at sea in terms of food quality and choice. The variety changes during the day, so check it out whenever you find yourself in the piazza. Note that while the food is included in the cruise fare, the café’s coffees are not.

The Buffet: Come as You Are, Eat What You Want – The buffets seem to be more popular than ever. Perhaps folks are more reluctant to get dressed up for the MDR and/or sit through long meals.

Or, maybe the buffet’s selection is the draw. On the Sky Princess, the buffet is massive, with varying items spanning both sides of the ship, as well as areas in the middle. The meal hours are generous too: breakfast until 11:30 a.m.; lunch until 3:30 p.m.; snacks until 5:30 p.m.; and dinner until 10 p.m.

American fare is among the options of the buffet.

Be sure not to miss the special last sea day lunch, which features a cake extravaganza. Dozens of colorful confections fill the bakery area, designed to send you off the ship with a sweet taste in your mouth.

Musing’s Top Tip: Princess may be the only cruise line left offering a galley tour for free. We gathered in the theater at 10 a.m. on the last sea day to watch a cooking demo led by the executive chef. This was followed by a brief singing performance by kitchen crew, and then we filed out to visit the galley, a wonderland of mastery, mystery and stainless steel.

The galley tour

Entertaining Thoughts

Think entertainment, and you usually picture a stage. But a lot of cruise ship entertainment takes place off stage and in the most unlikely of places. Here are just a few:
 
Bartender as showman. Juggling, it seems, is a new prerequisite for bartending. Many a cruise lounge features a bartender right out of Cocktail, sending glasses and bottles swirling into the air to a squealing and appreciative crowd. One “Quest” event’s opening act featured bartenders outdoing each other in their alcohol antics.
 
Crew talent night. We’ve seen these on Holland America (HAL), but the listing is buried in the newsletter and the events are late at night. But they’re well worth staying up for and great for the crew, too. They get to show they can do more than clean rooms and deliver food. And it can be a real treat to hear an unassuming room steward from Indonesia suddenly fill the room with a heart-stopping rendition of “O Sole Mia.”
 
Food for fun. I talked about this one in an earlier blog post, how the ships have taken the lead from TV and turned cooking into entertainment. We’ve seen “Iron Chef” knockoffs on HAL, kitchen crew skits on Princess, and been to countless food demos through HAL’s partnership with Food and Wine magazine, and on Celebrity’s ships as well.
 
Towel animals. Alas, towel animals are becoming a dying breed, as the ships try to better manage

room stewards’ workloads. Cruise veterans know the surprise of coming back from dinner to be greeted by a white elephant or swan sitting serenely on the bed, or a cotton monkey dangling from the ceiling. Our last menagerie was recently on Allure of the Seas.
 
Offbeat and memorable. We tend to think of ship captains as a serious lot, but one in particular smashed that misconception forever. He and another senior crew member delighted a loyalty club audience with their mimicry of two bulked-up acrobats.
 
Next to you at dinner, in the bar or the lounge chair. In the end, few forms of entertainment can beat watching your fellow passengers. There was the plump, white-bearded elderly man on a December cruise who showed up each day wearing a red stocking hat. The 30-something partyer who grabbed a wild iguana off the rocks in St. Thomas’ Crown Bay. Formal night’s kilts and kimonos. Bow-tied tots and five-inch stilettos.

The formal entertainment, food and ports on a cruise are a given. But it’s the unexpected that you really remember. And in the end, isn’t that what travel’s all about?

Cruise Food Hideaways

Sometimes, the best place to eat on a cruise ship is where no one else goes. It’s that little gem—the small café tucked away in a nook or cranny where the food is better—and free. But you could go through an entire seven-day trip and never find it.
 
If you follow the forums on your ship (see my July 18 posting, “Cruising the Web,” for a list), you’ll often find that oyster’s pearl. Here are some of the ones I’ve uncovered:
 
Celebrity’s AquaSpa Café—Like Royal Caribbean’s Solarium Bistro (see below), this fabulous little spot probably suffers from the mere suggestion that it serves health food. But it’s Celebrity’s best-

Salmon can be had already plated or
made to order at the AquaSpa Café
 

kept secret: it’s the only place onboard where you can get salmon, tuna or chicken made to order (you need to ask for it). It’s often hard to find—it’s usually in the Solarium (check the location on your ship), has just a few tables and is only open for breakfast and lunch. But it’s worth searching for.
 
Oasis Class’ Solarium Bistro—RCI’s Solarium Bistro, like the Solarium itself, was minimally used when we’ve been there. Like Celebrity’s café, it’s set up cafeteria-style, with the always-interesting food already plated. And the quality is excellent.
 
Oasis Class’ Park Café —This little place on RCI’s serene Central Park “neighborhood” serves breakfast and lunch. At lunch, you can get you-choose-it salads or hot paninis and while I’ve not tried it myself, the forums are filled with praise for the café’s roast beef sandwich.   
 
Princess’ International Café—While its location disqualifies the International Café as a hideaway (it’s in the piazza, the hub of the ship), it’s surprising how few people actually eat there. There’s a lot to like about the 24-hour café—while the drinks are not free (bar and specialty coffees), the food is. The salad combos, quiches and desserts vary every day, and they’re wonderful. And if you hit it just right, you’ll have live music to nosh by.
 

Making pizza on Princess

Pizza on Princess—While many cruisers already know that Princess has the best pizza on the sea, I’ve classified it as a hideaway because we have a devil of a time finding it on every ship. The last time on the Emerald, we must have circled Deck 15 three times before we found it. If you do take Princess, give it a try (if you can find it). Make it worth the while of the poor crew member sweating in the Caribbean heat who has to open that blazing-hot pizza oven all day long.
 
Musing’s Top Tip: Cruiseline.com, a website I highlighted in a posting a few weeks ago, has just made some improvements, including new ship pages, price drop notifications, itinerary maps and a search by the ship with the highest member reviews. A neat feature: once you bring up all the reviews on a particular ship, you can select “View all tips” to get a list of tips reviewers have submitted.