Welcome to the Crossroads! I’m continuing my reviews and commentary about my dining experiences on my recent Alaskan cruise aboard the NCL Bliss. This was my first sailing on a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship, and one of my questions before boarding was how the food tasted. This is the fourth cruise line I’ve sailed on, and my experiences on other ships have been hit and miss. Some have been good, and others not so much.

How was the main dining room grub on the Bliss? Let’s dig in and find out! These are the menus for the nights we ate in the MDR. Since this was our first cruise with NCL, we also wanted to try other dining options on the ship. This article has four of the MDR menus and my food reviews.

The Bliss has three main dining rooms: the larger Manhattan Dining Room, Taste, and Savor. Taste and Savor are smaller and mirror each other, while the Manhattan is larger and more reminiscent of your typical MDR. The menus served for each dinner are identical, so one dining room doesn’t have something different for a meal. I was also surprised by the dining rooms not having any set dining times. Everything was open-time dining, and you didn’t check in on the app; you checked in at the dining room of your choice and waited to be seated. This was a far different experience for me. I take pride in my ability to get us checked in for a table for dinner on a cruise ship app.

Once you choose your dining location and arrive to check in, it’s time to decide what you want to eat. A couple of weeks in advance, most of the menus were available on the NCL app. I searched the app to check out the menus and had a good idea of what I wanted to sample beforehand. Remember, the MDR hours in all three dining rooms are 5:30 through 9:30. They are swamped at opening time, but we found that if you arrived at the Manhattan a few minutes before they opened, they would sometimes begin seating early.

Dinner Night 1

On the first night on board, we had shrimp cake and cream of cauliflower soup for our appetizers. The shrimp cake was average. It had the same flavor as a crab cake, and the coating was soggy and not crisp because of how long the items sit out when plated. The soup was creamy and flavorful. If you don’t like cauliflower, this isn’t the dish for you because it has a strong cauliflower flavor profile.

The main dish was a gamble. BBQ spare ribs are usually not a great-tasting option on cruise dining room menus. Like I did with the brisket later on the cruise, I gave it a try. The wife tried the sautéed shrimp scampi. The scampi was delicious. The shrimp were well done, and the noodles were cooked evenly. The sauce wasn’t too heavy. The best thing on my plate was the corn on the cob. The ribs were overcooked, but the sauce did have a nice, sweet, smoky flavor.

Dessert was honey creme brulee and warm chocolate lava cake. The crème brûlée tasted slightly different from a normal one, and the top was nice and crisp. Sometimes, the top is overdone or the custard runs, but this was done very well. The lava cake was average. The lava had already turned into a solid and was overcooked. The best part of it was the ice cream.

Dinner Night 4

We ate at Cagney’s on night 2 and the Garden Cafe on night 3, so on night 4, between leaving Juneau and arriving at the Dawes Glacier, we caught a fast dinner in the Manhattan room to watch the icebergs float by in the Endicott Arm. Because we wanted to get in and out quickly, we only ordered a few items and skipped dessert. Instead of doing a normal three-course meal, we ordered two items each and had them brought out at one time to speed up the dining process.

We ordered the Montreal Spice-Rubbed Brisket, chicken cordon bleu, Lemon-Pepper Shrimp, and Hawaiian pork belly. I wanted to try the cannoli, but time did not allow it. The cordon bleu was pretty bland. The coating was soggy, and it was pretty meh. The lemon-pepper shrimp was fantastic. The shrimp were well seasoned, and the pasta was done perfectly once again. The pork belly was good, and the sauce was almost too sweet. The issue was how much of the dish was a foot-thick fat piece. I’ve had pork belly at Cagney’s on the Bliss, and it was a good cut of meat with minimal fat. The fat on this dish was excessive. Now, the brisket. I wrestled with whether I would order the brisket, knowing my luck with the dish on past sailings.

And it was just as dry and tasteless as I feared it would be. Shame on me for being fooled again…

Dining Night 5

After a long day in Icy Straight Point, we again braved the MDR to see how the food fared. Since this is a new cruise line for us to travel with, we wanted to try the MDR for dinner as much as possible.

For the sake of getting on with it, this meal was so forgettable that I’m forgetting it and moving on.

Dining Night 6

Day six was a long day of walking around Ketchikan. The only excursion we did was the Great American Lumberjack Show. If you’re ever in Ketchikan, click here to check out this fun experience. I’ll cover and review the port stop on the site soon, so be sure to subscribe to be notified when new content drops. We also did a walking tour of the downtown area and Creek Street, and I was starved by the time dinner rolled around.

First up for our appetizers were the cheese ravioli and baked brie salad. The ravioli was pretty good. The sauce wasn’t too heavy, the ravioli tasted good, and it was done with a good cheese blend for the filling. I was surprised by the baked brie salad. The pastry was light and wasn’t soggy like some cruise pasty can be. The filling was flavorful and not what I expected for a ‘salad’. Overall, this was one of the best nights for the quality and taste of the appetizer portion of our meal.

Ah, the main course. This is the moment I tried to figure out if doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result made me insane or not. My wife ordered the lamb shank, and I gave the brisket another go. I wanted it to be good this time, and I was pleasantly surprised that it was delicious this time around. It was juicy and not dry with a perfect blend of seasoning and gravy. The fries were horrible, but getting good and not soggy fries in the cruise ship MDR is extremely difficult. The lamb shank was also cooked perfectly with a good taste and flavorful sauce. This was also one of the strongest dinners we ate, but with the brisket, your mileage may vary as to the quality.

Now, as good as the appetizers and mains were, the desserts missed the mark. We ordered the eclairs and Snickers pound cake. The picture made the cake look like garlic toast, and it might as well have been. The cake was plain and had nothing that could be called Snickers. There may have been one sliver of chocolate. The ice cream was your average basic vanilla, and the only stand-out portion of the dish was the strawberries. The eclairs tasted plain with nothing standing out in the flavor profile. It was bland all the way around.

Dining Night 7

It was our last night on the Bliss, and we caught dinner before our late evening port stop in Victoria, B.C.

It was a weird port day with our stop in Victoria occurring at night for only a few hours. So, this was our last chance to dine in the MDR before returning to Seattle the next day.

The appetizers were both good. We ordered the scallops and the blue cheese soup. The scallops were tiny, but the serving contained many of them. They were cooked well and weren’t rubbery. The blue cheese soup was nice. It wasn’t too thick, but it featured a very good blue cheese flavor and was served at a perfect temperature.

Our main dishes were the grilled lemon-pepper shrimp and the bratwurst. The shrimp was as good as we had tasted on the cruise before. The brats didn’t have much seasoning, but the sides were decent. I know cruise food isn’t seasoned much due to people having a variety of tastes when it comes to seasonings. Still, you need to have some flavor in brats. I was disappointed, as it was one of the dishes I was excited to try after reading the menus before the cruise.

And now, the most disappointing dish I ordered on the entire cruise was the Nutella crème brûlée. The flavor tasted like a regular crème brûlée, and the top was soft and not crispy. I was surprised by the softness since it tasted burnt. I don’t know if it was because it sat for a while or if I got a bad one, but I was so disappointed. I didn’t even finish it, which is an indictment about how it tasted.

That wraps up my thoughts and reviews for the nights we ate in the MDR. I like the anytime structure of NCL and their dining; with three dining rooms, you usually don’t have to wait long for a table. Our cruise was fully booked, so plenty of cruisers were hitting the dining rooms. Overall, I’d put the food service as excellent, but the food was average. If I had to rank the four cruise lines I’d sailed on, I’d have to think long and hard about it. There are things about each cruise line that they do well, and things they don’t. Another oddity about NCL is the lack of a formal or lobster night. I did miss my cruise lobster.

I hope you enjoyed this look at the NCL Bliss MDR menus and reviews. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you out at the Crossroads,

Brent