Norwegian Epic Review
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1. Introduction.
1.1. Background and why we did this. Cruise food -- what a controversial topic! Everyone has an opinion about the food on a cruise. After all, other than the cabin accommodation and actual ship movement, food is just about the only thing included in the price. Besides, everyone has individual tastes and likes. Furthermore, everyone has a different level of gustatory experience -- some have dined in the best establishments around the world, while others always cook their own meals. Even the cruise food reviews are quite variable. Some reviews rave about the wonderful food while other reviews seem to indicate that ptomaine poisoning was a daily occurrence.
1.2. What we did. To try to address this controversial subject, four of us decided to do a fairly rigorous joint review of the food on a cruise. We chose the Norwegian Epic on a trans-Atlantic repositioning cruise. We sailed on 2012-Apr-14 from Miami and enjoyed 11 days on the way to Barcelona. We were most fortunate that this large and impressive ship was half-empty, so perhaps we had more than the usual amount of personal attention. Considering that Epic has 21 different food outlets, we had our work cut out for us. Accordingly, we created a disciplined review technique and did our best to visit as many restaurants as possible in 11 days. Each of us had a review sheet for every meal and recorded our findings right at the table. We broke the meal experience into 13 different scored factors as explained in paragraph 3 below. We often photographed the servings. All four of us did our scoring as independently as possible. We did our best to evaluate each meal as a stand-alone, not by means of a comparison to other ship-board meals. In other words, we tried to do our scoring using an absolute scale such that the same scoring technique could be applied to a super fancy formal dinner with the Queen or to a quick sandwich at a street corner barbeque pit. For each meal, the maximum possible total score was 100 points. At the end of the voyage, we summarized the scores, analyzed everything, and reached some conclusions about the food.