Food

You can’t do a cruise without mention of food.  Food, food, and more food. Disney does things differently in this regard. Rather than having one dining room, they have three (actually four when you count the speciality dining room) and while keeping the same table staff, you rotate among the three venues for different experiences. Animator’s Palate, Parrot Cay, and Lumiere’s are the three primary venues on the Magic.

Our table staff was wonderful! Giuseppe is from Italy and Avril is from St. Lucius. They were all done up in pirate garb for Pirate’s Night which we appropriately celebrated in Parrot Cay.

I developed such faith in Giuseppe’s recommendations that I told him one evening that I was going to leave it up to him for my selections the next evening which happened to be at Lumiere’s.

He selected escargot for my appetizer and Jeff selected it for his as well. He was excited about trying it until his sweet wife started talking about the banana slugs we grew up with in the northwest. I enjoyed them.

The second course was excellent French onion soup.

The main course was sea bass on a mushroom risotto. Very nicely presented but we were quite surprised at the different portion sizes. Three of us had sea bass with two of the portions easily twice as large as the third portion. These widely varied portion sizes happened on other meals as well. The risotto had a wonderful flavor but was still slightly crunchy.

Dessert was Crème Brule but didn’t last long enough to get a picture.

The grandson wasn’t quite as adventurous, selecting Mac & Cheese with mixed vegetables and fries most evening. His ice cream bar did feature Disney’s reputation for attention to detail – note that some of the sprinkles are Mickey shaped.

We had breakfast most mornings at the buffet on the fantail on deck 9. Food was good, and the warm weather with a light breeze make it even better.

All in all, the food was consistent with comments we read before the cruise. Beautifully presented by excellent table staff, but the food prep, portioning, and seasoning wasn’t as consistently well done as other cruise lines.