Sailing Like a Celebrity -- Day 4
Published Sunday, December 31st 2023Day 4 -- At Sea
Overcast, low to mid 70s
BOOM! We were awakened at 6 am by a loud crash off the starboard side. One thunderclap and I was wide awake. I was surprised at how close it sounded. But strangely, it was the only one. Didn't matter, though, as I wasn't going back to sleep. So I went up to Oceanview Café and got coffee and pastries and brought them back to the room, where we just took it easy to start the day.
At 10 am, there was a Galley Tour, where we got to walk through the kitchens and learned a little from the chef's staff. A lot of people showed up for the tour. Before we actually got into the kitchen, there was a Q & A with the head chef. They talked about how the menus are created, about food waste, about preventing bacterial contamination, among other things. They broke us up into groups of about 10 people, and then we went with a staff member. What we heard was pretty interesting, but I was a little surprised by how loud it was in the kitchen. Not sure why this surprised me, since it's a relatively small enclosed space. In any case, I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Desserts:
That's a lot of croutons!
For lunch, we had our only meal at a specialty restaurant. They served a seafood lunch at the Tuscan Grille restaurant. It was really good. There was a menu and you could order as much as you wanted. I had the seafood chowder, which was really excellent. There was also a scallop appetizer, and a watermelon salad with feta cheese. We all got the Lobster Thermador. I also ordered the coconut shrimp, and then Kathryn and I split a fantastic steak. Everything was prepared wonderfully, and all the items I got were delicious. Dessert was a parfait or a mango cheesecake.
Scallops:
Seafood chowder:
Watermelon and feta salad:
Lobster and Coconut Shrimp:
Lobster and steak (with béarnaise sauce on the side).
)When my poker game finished, I went up to the pool deck, got a chocolate/strawberry twist, and relaxed by listening to The Seagulls for a while.
The evening show was a song-and-dance performance. My personal experience with this type of show on a cruise has not been especially good. Most of the time, it seems kind of "thrown together", and either the singing or dancing is just ok at best. So I opted to skip this one. Kathryn and Dale went, and they said that the performers were very talented, but that the show was confusing and not cohesive. (At one point, one of the performers said, "Hey, that was really good, right? It's ok to clap! Yeah, come on!" The audience just wasn't following what was going on.) Between numbers, however, there were two very talented acrobats who did short performances between the musical pieces. I was sorry that I missed that part of the show.
Like a lot of cruise lines, Celebrity has done away with Formal Nights in their restaurants. However, they replaced them with Chic Nights. This is not necessarily to dress formally, but just to dress up as you like: fancy, showy, whatever. So we dressed up and headed to dinner.
Kathryn had a pâté appetizer (although, like our Royal Clipper sailing last year, it was called a parfait) and she said it was amazing. I had the corn soup, which I liked a lot. The corn was almost pureed and the soup was very thick. I really liked it. Several entrees sounded good, so we ordered 4 entrees for the table and just shared them all. We got the roasted lamb, the shrimp scampi, the beef roulade, and the BBQ salmon. Kathryn said the lamb was excellent. The scampi was also very good (plenty of garlic!), but the shrimp had a slightly spicy coating that they really didn't need. I don't expect my scampi to be spicy. The beef was also excellent. The bbq sauce made the salmon really unusual, and Kath didn't really love it, but I enjoyed it.
The pâté
My corn soup
The lamb
Shrimp scampi
Beef roulade
BBQ salmon
For dessert, Kathryn got a fruit flower. This was fresh fruit inside a filo dough cup shaped like a flower. It was light and fresh and Kathryn liked it a lot. I got the apple crumble, which was fine, but nothing too special.
The evening show was an ABBA tribute. It was very fun and the girls loved it. Lots of energy, lots of fun music. The next day one of the restaurant servers was singing "Dancing Queen" all night.
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