Awful food on Harmony of the Seas

[Charles4515]

3 hours ago, Tree_skier said:

It is interesting that individual takes can be so different.  We've cruised Royal, NCL and MSC and in the MDR Royal was far and away the best of the bunch. Both in terms of food and service.  I'd say the NCL and Royal were a tie on specialty restaurants.  Everything about MSC was disappointing.

We don’t really have a different take. I don’t care much for NCL and have never been on MSC. 

[LobsterStalker]

1 hour ago, rolloman said:

Delusional. The ingredients are the same, regardless of who prepares it. The food in the main dining room has taken a steep dive. You are not helping the situation by claiming it is an anomaly.  Soon there will be no such thing as a free main dining room. Thanks in part to posts like yours. 

That is what I believe the end goal; is 

 

Cheers

[LobsterStalker]

54 minutes ago, poocher said:

The OP had posted about vacationing in Napa with $300 dinners so it doesn’t surprise me that Royal food doesn’t live up.

Yeah... That !

[firefly333]

1 hour ago, rolloman said:

Exactly right...the food is the same regardless of who is eating it... some people like a bologna sandwich and think they are great. Others prefer a more upscale dinner of which they have paid a premium for. Pay attention to what he said, he said the food will get better as he blamed it on the preparer. Which is delusional thinking as the preparer has the same menu and ingredients as any other chef onboard. It is what it is...the food will not get better unless the price goes up. It is the new standard until it is not. FACT

 

Sorry but I disagree somewhat. For instance grandeur the food was spicier. Same food I'm sure and same recipes but it was definitely spicier .. tasted different to me. Food does very by ship

[time4u2go]

1 hour ago, bigque said:

I am not  going to doubt the OP’s “Opinion” of the food but OMG to say everything they ate at every venue they ate at on the ship was bad just can’t buy into that….. I’m sorry!

You might want to read their post again. They did not say that everything they ate at every venue was bad.

[time4u2go]

5 hours ago, allyfree said:

Royal couldn't care less ... we pay for food in our bookings ... then we buy the UDP because the food isn't great in MDR & Windjammer ... that means they can offer poorer quality food in reduced amounts whilst they laugh all the way to the bank ! We need to stop feeding the troll ...

Agreed. As long as people keep paying for the specialty restaurants, the cruise line has no incentive to improve the quality of the included food.

[chill6x6]

Was on the Harmony in November.....and NCL Escape last month.  Stayed Star class on Harmony and in the Haven on Escape so no MDR experience.  Ate at lots of speciality restaurants, The Haven Restaurant(NCL), Coastal Kitchen(Royal), Windjammer(rRoyal), and Garden Cafe(NCL).  

 

Best suite restaurant- Coastal Kitchen.  Changing nightly menu and more pleasant staff. Wait staff 10/10

Best Specialty Restaurant- La Cucina(NCL).  Perfect food and service.

Worst Specialty Restaurant- Sabor(Royal).  What a blown opportunity for good Mexican food. 

Best Buffet Restaurant- EASILY the Garden Cafe(NCL).  What a difference!  The Windjammer used to be so good! 

Room service- VERY good on both IMO! Maybe a slight advantage to NCL.

 

BESIDES the Windjammer/Sabor...we thought the food on Harmony was very good! Was surprised by Wonderland!  BUT....I will have to give NCL a slightly better grade for overall food quality, service, and taste.  As someone that cruises both, I never thought I'd be able to say that. 

[Engineroom Snipe]

37 minutes ago, time4u2go said:

Agreed. As long as people keep paying for the specialty restaurants, the cruise line has no incentive to improve the quality of the included food.

From what I have read, as the Unlimited Dining Packages (UDP) become more popular, the less reservations are available. For instance, The Enchantment of the Seas only has Chops Grille as a specialty restaurant. There are only so many lunches and dinner seats available. If they oversell the UDP, RCI is not responsible as they do not have any type of guarantee in the purchase that it will be available.

 

One must make a reservation and reservation capacity is limited to the seats available.

 

Imagine paying for a UDP to only find out as your board later on Sunday afternoon of your cruise that the times available for ANY reservations are too early or later than what you would like. On an 8 night cruise on Enchantment, a price of $250 per person plus gratuities is considered a "good deal". Only if you can get a reservation each day for lunch and dinner. It will be the same menu for eight days.

 

The UDP just does not make sense to me in this situation.

[Sigyn]

3 hours ago, ReneeFLL said:

Why would you expect anything different?

 

Because when we went to the specialty restaurants on our NCL cruise on the Prima, most of them were a notch (or two) better than what we would expect when visiting that type of restaurant at home. We went to Onda on the Prima, and the food was amazing, the service was outstanding, and each dish was perfectly prepared. I hoped the hibachi would take it up a notch as well. 

[Sigyn]

2 hours ago, poocher said:

The OP had posted about vacationing in Napa with $300 dinners so it doesn’t surprise me that Royal food doesn’t live up.

There is that. I do like good food and well-prepared dishes. That said, the mushroom soup at Chops was really, really good. I mentioned it in my original post. I told my husband just this afternoon that it was nearly as good as my favorite soup at Goose & Gander in St. Helena in Napa Valley. 

But that's the thing - the speciality restaurants on NCL's Prima for our December cruise were really good. They were worth the upcharge. Were they all as good as my favorites in Napa Valley? No. But Onda was. And at all of the restaurants some of the dishes were as good, and others came close and the service was really outstanding in all of them. I had high hopes for the same on Royal Caribbean since the pricing was similar and it caters to the same type of crowd. 

[Charles4515]

16 minutes ago, njsmom said:

But that's the thing - the speciality restaurants on NCL's Prima for our December cruise were really good. They were worth the upcharge. Were they all as good as my favorites in Napa Valley? No. But Onda was. And at all of the restaurants some of the dishes were as good, and others came close and the service was really outstanding in all of them. I had high hopes for the same on Royal Caribbean since the pricing was similar and it caters to the same type of crowd. 

Prima is NCL's hot ship right now and probably their best chefs and crew were deployed to Prima. Management is likely watching everything on Prima right now. What will food and service it be like in a year or so?

[NaplesGoBlue]

3 hours ago, rolloman said:

Exactly right...the food is the same regardless of who is eating it... some people like a bologna sandwich and think they are great. Others prefer a more upscale dinner of which they have paid a premium for. Pay attention to what he said, he said the food will get better as he blamed it on the preparer. Which is delusional thinking as the preparer has the same menu and ingredients as any other chef onboard. It is what it is...the food will not get better unless the price goes up. It is the new standard until it is not. FACT

 

Okay, you made some valid points, but this statement is absolutely comical.  You're saying that every chef and kitchen team has the exact same ingredients and exact same menus, so they should all essentially produce the exact same results?  How about we put the line cook at your local Waffle House in the exact same kitchen against Chef Bobby Flay, and give them the exact same ingredients to make the exact same dish -- let's say Chicken Parm....  You're telling me your expectation is that those two plates would result in indistinguishable dishes???  LOL.  That's like saying every pitcher in baseball uses the same official weight/size ball and throws from the exact same distance to home plate at 60' - 6".  So, the performance results of a high school pitcher should be the same as Justin Verlander, based on the fact that all data points (other than the actual personnel) are constants. Yeah, okay.   

Edited April 10, 2023 by NaplesGoBlue

[Husky1987]

4 hours ago, poocher said:

The OP had posted about vacationing in Napa with $300 dinners so it doesn’t surprise me that Royal food doesn’t live up.

 

🤣 LOL  The "I'm so very rich but I won't spend $20k on a suite" thread now makes so much sense. 

[HicksRA]

It’s obvious that Royal’s main focus nowadays is creating an amusement park for young families and kiddos - not quasi luxury type vacations for mostly mature adults like the old days where there was a focus on finer dining and special attention by the staff.  (I know those are still available elsewhere for the price)

I guess they figure the new preferred demographic will tolerate Golden Corral quality food and reduced service based on their different priorities.  
 

I don’t cruise to ride a roller coaster, slide down a lucite tube or play bumper cars and miss the quality food and service that Royal has diluted. My list of pending cruises is winding down with no real desire to look at booking more. 
 

My last cruise was so bad I was anxious to get back to port for debarkation.  

 

 

Edited April 10, 2023 by HicksRA

[RockHoundTX]

I have been cruising since the 1980s (I was a teen at the time). I have seen quality and service go up and down several times. From my experience, the early 2000s where the peak of "quantity and choice". This seemed to be especially the case as the Liberty and larger class ships came on-line. Quality has always been variable. I have been on B2B cruises where the quality was great one week and terrible the next (a new head-chef took over on the 2nd cruise). The exact same dishes went from hot and flavorful the first week to warm and bland the second. Any insinuation that the cooks don't matter is completely preposterous.

 

Over my last 30 or so cruises, I would say that Carnival has a much better lunch but RCCL has better dinner/MDR. I have had two experiences where the food was "OMG!!! This is incredible.". The first was in about 2016 on a "reduced capacity" trip on LIberty where the ship repositioned to Freeport for work on the thrusters. On that trip, we had lobster and lamb chops in the Windjammer! The next was a post-Covid trip a few months after cruising opened back up. There was not as much variety or "specialty foods" but everything was cooked perfectly. The Prime Rib in the MDR ranked in the top 3 I had ever eaten (and I have eaten my weight in Prime Rib at some of the best restaurants in the US). 

 

I have only had the food be "totally inedible" on one cruise. On that one (on Carnival), about half the cooking staff were in quarantine. Oil literally dripped off the food and I ended up with food poisoning (along with numerous others that were on the Roll Call). Of my last 5 cruises across both Carnival and RCCL, the MDR food has been drastically under-whelming. My first two cruises in 2022 it was due to supply chain issues and the chefs were trying to "make do with what they had" (i.e., onion soup without onions, tomatoe sauce used in dishes that were supposed to have cream sauce, etc.). On my last 3 cruises, the quality was just poor (lower quality meats, frozen instead of fresh dishes, etc.) compared to what I would call "cruise industry average" over the last 5-10 years.

 

Food is the primary "enjoyment" on a cruise for my wife and myself (mainly since we very seldom eat at restaurants  and on a cruise we don't have to cook). We currently only have 1 cruise booked for this year (and that was because we booked it early last year). With prices being twice what they were and food quality being disapointing, cruising is no longer the "cheap and enjoyable" vacation for us that it has been over the last 10-15 years. I watch these posts mainly to see if quality is improving yet (looks to be a resounding "no") to know if I should tell my wife to start looking again. Eventually, the quality will improve since the market will demand it (just as it has a couple of times over the last 30 years).      

  

 

[PhillyFan33579]

11 hours ago, njsmom said:

Just got off of Harmony of the Seas. I was surprised at how bad the food was. We've cruised Carnival and Norwegian and the Royal Caribbean food was on par with Carnival. Which is to say, not good. Norwegian's food is quite good, and the specialty restaurants on Norwegian are as good as fine dining restaurants in the real world, but Royal Caribbean is just blech.

We did the Unlimited Dining Package and ate in specialty restaurants much of the time to try to overcome the yucky food factor, to no avail. Chops, 150 Central Park, Sabor...the food was all pretty meh. Jamie's was delicious for lunch one day, but the very same dish - prawns with linguine - ordered for dinner another night was dry and disappointing as if it had been sitting out for hours, waiting for someone to order it and then they'd heated it up again. The pasta carbonara was a favorite of my son's every time he tried it, fortunately. If I had to pick a decent specialty restaurant, I'd opt for Jamie's, since sometimes it was good and some dishes were tasty. The lamb chops at dinner were very good. But the eggplant parmigiana, not so much. 

At Chops, the steaks were tough and overcooked. The bacon appetizer was a strip of fatty, wet pork. The mushroom soup was a win, however. At 150 Central Park, the pork belly was literally a blob of crispy fat with not a speck of actual meat within it. The tenderloin for two was overcooked. The lobster thermidor was chewy and meh. We cancelled a second dinner we had scheduled at 150 Central Park out of disappointment from night #1. The ceviche at Sabor had to be sent back. It was bland and the texture was weird. The shrimp tacos were overly salty. But the guac was good. Wonderland was fun, but only half of the dishes tasted good. On and on...we did formal night in the MDR and were completely underwhelmed.

 

On the positives, the hibachi restaurant was very good, and we thoroughly enjoyed that but it was no different than any hibachi restaurant you'd find at home. The Izumi sushi restaurant was good, too, but it wasn't outstanding, just a regular sushi restaurant. But since we'd had such awful food until that point, we were happy to have edible food we could enjoy. I did really like the Greek salad I had on CocoCay from the snack shack on Chill Island. That was very good and completely surprised me. 

 

We did Windjammer for breakfast each morning and that was actually okay. Funny that the buffet was the best thing we did. Maybe because I just ate yogurt and fruit  and my son ate pastries and waffles. Altho the coffee was lukewarm. My son enjoyed Sorrento's Pizza, but I didn't try it. 

I was so disappointed in the food. I had hoped it would be better and that everyone's complaints were overblown. They were not. 

Just curious why you would cruise on RCI if you prefer the food on NCL? Personally I like RCI’s food, which is why the majority of my cruises every year are with RCI, although I try to squeeze in a few cruises on Celebrity every year too. 

[RockHoundTX]

Probably the same reason my family goes on Carnival even though we all prefer RCCL: money. In our case, over the last 18 months Carnival has been 30%-40% cheaper for the exact same itenerary. For that $$ difference, I am willing to give up my Diamond perks and settle for bacon every other day. Unfortunately, the MTD on my last two RCCL cruises were not that good (and the lunches on Carnival are still much better than RCCL). I completely sympathize with the OP. It sucks to spend big $$ on a cruise (especially if you spend extra for a UDP) and it not live up "average" expectations based on a base-line of pre and post-Covid cruises.      

[joeyancho]

13 hours ago, smokeybandit said:

Did you tell this to the staff when they served your food? Or did you just save it all up for a message board rant after the cruise?

What does it matter?  Do you think if they complained the food was going to improve instantly?

Edited April 10, 2023 by joeyancho

[rolloman]

8 hours ago, NaplesGoBlue said:

Okay, you made some valid points, but this statement is absolutely comical.  You're saying that every chef and kitchen team has the exact same ingredients and exact same menus, so they should all essentially produce the exact same results?  How about we put the line cook at your local Waffle House in the exact same kitchen against Chef Bobby Flay, and give them the exact same ingredients to make the exact same dish -- let's say Chicken Parm....  You're telling me your expectation is that those two plates would result in indistinguishable dishes???  LOL.  That's like saying every pitcher in baseball uses the same official weight/size ball and throws from the exact same distance to home plate at 60' - 6".  So, the performance results of a high school pitcher should be the same as Justin Verlander, based on the fact that all data points (other than the actual personnel) are constants. Yeah, okay.   

Again, he said the food will get better and I said it will not. The current condensed menu, using the current recipe, in the MDR is the same fleetwide. For sure, if someone forgets to add one of the ingredients, such as salt, that particular night the same entree served fleet wide will be worse than usual. But at its peak, it will still be subpar compared to say 10+ years ago. Smaller portions, limited options, stressed out service.

[Sigyn]

9 hours ago, Husky1987 said:

 

🤣 LOL  The "I'm so very rich but I won't spend $20k on a suite" thread now makes so much sense. 

haha. the game of telephone lives on!

[Sigyn]

8 hours ago, PhillyFan33579 said:

Just curious why you would cruise on RCI if you prefer the food on NCL? Personally I like RCI’s food, which is why the majority of my cruises every year are with RCI, although I try to squeeze in a few cruises on Celebrity every year too. 

The cruise date and itinerary worked for my son's spring break. I booked five weeks before the cruise. it was a last minute decision. And I thought since it was a mother-son cruise, the focus would be on him and he'd enjoy the experience. I was right. He did. He LOVED it and didn't care about the quality of the food. He had a blast. I'm the whiner here. (My next cruise in 80-some days is with Celebrity. I've never tried Celebrity before, but looking forward to it.)

[Kathscof]

Well, the fact that the same dish was good once and bad the other time makes me hope it was the action of someone (the chef, the staff leaving it out too long, etc) instead of the "badness" of the ingredients and they can train that instead of continuing to buy "bad" food 🙂 

[allyfree]

10 hours ago, HicksRA said:

It’s obvious that Royal’s main focus nowadays is creating an amusement park for young families and kiddos - not quasi luxury type vacations for mostly mature adults like the old days where there was a focus on finer dining and special attention by the staff.  (I know those are still available elsewhere for the price)

I guess they figure the new preferred demographic will tolerate Golden Corral quality food and reduced service based on their different priorities.  
 

I don’t cruise to ride a roller coaster, slide down a lucite tube or play bumper cars and miss the quality food and service that Royal has diluted. My list of pending cruises is winding down with no real desire to look at booking more. 
 

My last cruise was so bad I was anxious to get back to port for debarkation.  

 

 

You are in my head .... I couldn't have put it better myself !

[Vibe]

10 hours ago, HicksRA said:

It’s obvious that Royal’s main focus nowadays is creating an amusement park for young families and kiddos - not quasi luxury type vacations for mostly mature adults like the old days where there was a focus on finer dining and special attention by the staff.  (I know those are still available elsewhere for the price)

I guess they figure the new preferred demographic will tolerate Golden Corral quality food and reduced service based on their different priorities.  
 

I don’t cruise to ride a roller coaster, slide down a lucite tube or play bumper cars and miss the quality food and service that Royal has diluted. My list of pending cruises is winding down with no real desire to look at booking more. 
 

My last cruise was so bad I was anxious to get back to port for debarkation.  

 

 

The experience you are looking for can be found for a similar price on Celebrity or Princess.

[sowhat]

When Royal Caribbean charge $6500 for a basic balcony cabin for 12 nights, then have the audacity to charge more for so called special restaurants. I expect  more

In the main dining room, I expect quality well presented, cooked to perfection ,served at the correct  temperature food ,in a leisurely manner and in nice surroundings, not low quality canteen grub

That's why  we have stopped cruising  until they receive  better reviews