Disney Cruise Part 5: The Food

Because that’s an important part of a cruise, right?  We ate A LOT.  There are three free sit-down restaurants.  For dinner, you sign up for either an early or late seating, and you eat at 6:15 or 8:15, and then your show is the opposite.  We chose the late seating because the restaurant and show are less crowded that way.  You’re assigned to different restaurants every night, so you rotate through them and eat at some more than twice.  For dinner, you’re assigned a table number and depending on the size of your table, you might have one or two other families with you.  You eat with the same group at the same table number every night, even when you go to different restaurants.  They even keep the same servers assigned to you, so after a couple of days, they know what you want to drink, they know everyone’s name, and you get to kind of know each other.

The first night we were nervous to see what our dinner companions would be like, and we were relieved that we actually liked the other family at our table!  Phew!  They were really cool, and they had a boy and a girl not too far in age from our kids.  In fact, we found out they were staying in the stateroom right next door to us!  We ended up doing a lot of stuff with them, and the kids all played together.  Sometimes we’d visit on our verandas when we were both in our rooms.  It was a lot of fun having another family to hang around with like that.  This is the eight of us on our last day:
 

The servers are cool.  One night, several of us had baked potatoes, and we all needed lots of sour cream and bacon bits, so the next night when we showed up, there were bowls of sour cream and bacon bits waiting on the table.  Another night, Rob asked for a little bowl of maraschino cherries for our sodas, and the next night, we had bowls of cherries waiting for us the next time, plus the stuff for the potatoes!  It was pretty funny.
 

The servers also interacted with the kids really well.  The kids can order off the kids menu or the adult menu, and they can ask for seconds, or they can asked for their food to be a certain way, and the servers were always happy to do it.  They played and joked with the kids, and a couple of times, they cut our meat for us.  Not just the kids’ meat, but the adults, too.  Uh-huh.  Here are our servers, Adela and Noel:
 

Here's Adela getting down on Robbie's level one day when he was being shy:

We had no problem waiting til that 8:15 to eat dinner, because we could pretty much eat all day leading up to that if you want to.  You can eat breakfast and lunch in any of the three restaurants, because you’re not assigned anywhere for the other meals, plus there’s a buffet separate from those.  There’s one other restaurant that’s supposed to be a little nicer, but you pay extra for it and have to make reservations.  We ended up not going to that one because we were pretty happy with the food situation as it was.

The buffet is on the same deck as the pool, and you can eat inside or bring your food out by the pool to eat.  Also on that deck is a pizzeria, a place for burgers/fries/hot dogs, a sandwich/fruit place, several soda fountains, and a four-flavor soft-serve ice cream station.  All included!  The soda fountains (and hot chocolate dispenser, too) and the ice cream are self-serve, so you can really load up.  You can just be walking past and decide you want a slice of pizza or an ice cream cone or some fresh fruit, and there you have it!

Goofy's Galley - sandwiches & fruit

Self-serve ice cream!  I wish they had one of these at work.

This is inside one of the restaurants, Triton's.  It had an under-the-sea theme, following The Little Mermaid.  It's hard to see, but the back wall is a mosaic of Ariel and King Triton.

One of the restaurants didn't allow us to take photos because it was too cool.  :)  It was called Animator's Palate, and it starts out black and white.  There are black and white line drawings on some of the walls that look like sketches from a Disney animation studio.  As your meal progresses, the room slowly starts to fill with color... parts of the sketches fill in with color, and big paint palates on the ceiling start to light up with different colors.  By the end of the meal, the whole restaurant is full-color; the waitstaff has even changed from black and white vests to colorful ones!  Very cool.

One of the highlights of all the eating we did was on lobster night when I ordered a lobster tail and the waiter asked me how many.  :o  I told him one, but he brought two anyway, and THEN he shelled them for me!  (And yes, I did eat them both...)