Silversea has been blindly focused on cutting costs and this has severely impacted the quality of its offerings. This cost cutting has shown up it two areas. The first is the ship was grossly understaffed and the staff that were there were undertrained, inexperienced, and often not qualified for the positions they held. The wait staff, who were there, to the most part, did an outstanding job. it's just that there were not enough of them. This resulted in long delays to get mediocre food.

One disastrous dinner in the Atlantide is funny now in retrospect. I ordered softshell crab tempura for an appetizer and beef bourguignon for my main. After a half hour or so an order of foie gras showed up as my appetizer. I told the waiter that I had ordered the softshell crab tempura for my appetizer. The foie gras disappeared and a half an hour or so later, a very soggy softshell crab tempura arrived. It was edible but just. A half an hour or so later an order of bouillabaisse arrived. I told the waiter that I had ordered beef bourguignon for my main. The bouillabaisse disappeared. A half an hour or so later the waiter stopped by to tell me the cook had just put on my steak to cook. I told him that I had order beef bourguignon for my main. As he went back to the kitchen and as my wife had long finished her dinner we left.

My guess the food was mediocre because they were short of kitchen staff as well, so they were pressing ill-prepared staff into a position they simply were not trained for. This resulted in a very inconsistent quality of food. For instance, one lunch in the Grill I order a Mexican Street Corn Salad. What showed up was a salad with a few bits of corn and the rest some form of pasta. The pasta was the last item in the salad description. The lack of corn could have been because they had run out of it. They seem to have been running out of a lot of things. For example, anchovies disappeared five days before the end of the cruise and butter went to tiny little sealed packages. I’m being generous in assuming they were short of kitchen staff as the alternative would be to assume that regular full staff was inept. Read more