Carnival Pride docked this morning in Long Beach after my seven-day trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo San Lucas. First, the positives: Stunning, new (2002) ship with marble nearly everywhere and Renaissance painting copies throughout. Stateroom: Ample size, sparkling clean with large, tiled bathroom. By appearances, all suggested a high-quality weeks voyage.
Now, the cruel realities: Oddly the longer-hours buffet on Deck 9 tended towards more consistently high-quality food. Steam tabled foods normally run a poor second to the quality of more freshly prepared meals. Pride runs contrary to normal expectations.
The menu in Normandie dining room somewhat disappointed me in its variety, balance, and cohesiveness of thought--quirky, disorganized, inscrutable, even a little bizarre. In attempting to be edgy, cooks sometimes seem to forget that everyone likes an unfussy steak or filet of fish at least half the time. You wont find that basic or down to earth philosophy of foods on Carnival Pride. For me, fancy sounds fine after one establishes with a sound command of basic foods. That never happened this past week. The hip menu fleshed out even less well than it looked on paper: Food serving temperatures varied unevenly between lukewarm and flatly cold. Aggravating this state of affairs, the food runners brought out up to twenty plates at one time to centralized serving stands and over the next ten to twenty minutes and then inexplicably, while the harried waiters attempted to distribute the entree plates, whatever possibly once came out from the kitchen hot soon dropped in temperature 10-30 degrees while setting out in the room air. This calls to mind the concept, Dennys at Sea. Even Dennys usually manages to serve mediocre food hot, in most cases.