Today’s blog is all about my favourite topic, food. I am very much a ‘I live to eat’ person and I love all things food. From where to buy it, where to eat it, getting to cook it and reading and learning about it. I often plan trips and holidays around food and would never consider going anywhere where food was mass produced, of poor quality or just plain boring. Why would I consider then going on a cruise where over two thousand people had to be fed? Surely with having to cater for so many people, the quality and presentation would suffer? I wanted to go on a cruise but I wanted to eat well, and by that I mean quality over quantity, and I focused quite a bit on what different cruise lines had to offer in the way of different eating experiences when choosing our cruise. That wasn’t easy because people’s opinion vary. What one person would consider delicious, another wouldn’t. Dining differs from cruise line to cruise line. Some ships have numerous different dining venues, others less so. Apart from Virgin, which does things very differently, you will generally get to choose where to eat between the main dining room (some ships have more than one,) the buffet and speciality restaurants. As a rule you have to pay a supplement to eat in the speciality restaurants. On the QM2 there is the Britannia restaurant which is the main dining room, The buffet in the Kings Court, traditional pub food in the Golden Lion pub, small plates in the Carinthia lounge and afternoon tea in the Queen’s Room and other venues. If you are staying in a suite you have your own restaurants. Eating in any of these venues is included in your fare as is room service which isn’t so on most ships. For a supplement we could eat in the alternative restaurants, The Steakhouse at the Verandah or on our cruise, in Coriander or Nordyls which can be found in an area of the buffet, although you wouldn’t know it as the tables are laid with linen clothes and beautiful place settings. Apart from the Verandah, the other restaurants depend on where you are cruising to. Nordyls served Nordic inspired dishes because we were in Norway, but if you were cruising in the Med, it would be something different. There was also a Boardwalk cafe on the upper deck but it was closed for the duration of the cruise but apparently when it is open it serves the likes of burgers and hotdogs.

Dressed smartly and adhering to the dress code, Mr R and I made our way to the main dining room for our first dinner of the cruise. We had opted for the late sitting as we tend to eat late at home. This was at 8.30pm. The first sitting was at 6pm which for us was far too early. There is the option to dine when you want but we wanted to be sat at the same table with the same waiting staff. We had opted to share a table of six. A bit of a gamble as you have no idea who you would be sitting with and there was always a risk that you might sit with people who would rather not talk to you or someone who never stopped talking. On my first cruise I shared a breakfast table with lovely people but they only talked about dogs and I’m a cat person!

As it was, we couldn’t have asked for better table chums.

The Britannia restaurant is a pretty snazzy place to eat. Actually, that’s an understatement. It’s stunningly beautiful and very stylish with gorgeous art deco touches. The two levels are connected by a pair of sweeping staircase. The perfect spot for that all important photo when you are dressed to impress especially with the two storey high frieze of the ship as a backdrop. Look up in the central atrium and you’ll be wowed by the stained glass ceiling of greens and blues. The tables are beautifully laid with starched white linen, fine glass and silverware and the porcelain crockery is Wedgewood. Fresh flowers decorate the tables. We were wowed by the restaurant and wondered if this was what us steerage passengers ate in, what were the restaurants for the suite passengers like?

We were shown our table where we would eat in the evening if we opted to eat in the main dining room rather than the other options. Sharing our table of six was Steve and Anya, musicians from Ontario. The other two places remained empty all week. It became a bit of a thing between the four of us imagining who the mystery missing people were and why they weren’t eating with us. We really enjoyed the company of our Canadian tablemates. They were great to chat to and once Mr R discovered they were classical musicians he was in his element. Mr R is a huge classical music fan.

We were served all week by the same two waiters who were simply the best. The looked after us so well and were great fun. When they found out it was my birthday, they organised a group of waiters to sing Happy Birthday to me, They probably do this all the time but it does make you feel rather special and it was a lovely surprise.

At dinner there were five courses with good choices for each course. You could have as little or as much as you wanted. My greedy husband often had a cheese plate as well as dessert. Five courses may seem a lot but each one is quite small so you don’t feel overfull or piggy. We really enjoyed all of the food in the main dining room. It was tasty, hot and well presented.

We also had breakfast in the Britannia restaurant a couple of times. You are sat at a different table each time and we had a table for two each time which suited us fine as we aren’t at our chatty, small talk best in the morning. There’s a good choice of hot dishes and the usual cereal, toast and pastries. The coffee is good and the juice, although not the freshly squeezed variety – to have that there would have to be crates and crates of oranges onboard – was perfectly drinkable. The only downside was the scrambled egg which wasn’t soft and creamy and a bit of a disappointment.

We don’t like to get up early on holiday. It’s a treat to enjoy a bit of a lie in with a nice cup of tea. We are on holiday after all. They stop serving breakfast in the restaurant at 9.30am or it could even be 9am. I forget which, so we tended to end up going to the buffet instead. The buffet on my last cruise wasn’t my favourite place to eat. It was always busy and trying to find somewhere to sit was a challenge especially as a solo passenger. There wasn’t a lot of space to move around and it often got congested. Fortunately, the Kings Court (the buffet on Queen Mary 2) is spacious with lots of seating. The table that had a sea view tended to get snapped up quickly but there was lots of alternatives including breakfast bar type tables with bar stools, something I steer clear of as I cannot for the life of me get on one without looking as though I’m climbing the Eiger!

There are lots of different food stations with great choices at all meals. In the afternoon you can pop in for all the goodies that make up an afternoon tea and if you are still peckish you can go for late night snacks although how anyone has space for more food beggar’s belief. There are tea, coffee and cold drinks stations but if you want something else to drink there are bar staff at hand. The informality of the buffet is popular with families and for those that don’t want to dress up in the evening. Oops, nearly forgot to mention that there is a soft serve ice cream station with cones. You can imagine how popular that was with both little and big kids onboard.

Also included in your fare is lunch in the Golden Lion pub, afternoon tea in the Queen’s Room and room service. We didn’t try any of these but will do when we go on a longer cruise. The pub serves your typical traditional pub fare including fish and chips and pie. Perfect to go with a pint of Cunard’s own beer. Lunch in the pub is very popular so you need to get there early. You also need to be early to get a table straight away for the formal afternoon tea. The white gloved waiters parade into the room with their trays of pots of tea to Strauss’s Radetzky march and lots of clapping to the music. I’m not sure that this is Mr R’s thing. He’d call it a bit naff, but I’d love it. Maybe I will pop on my tea dress and go it alone next time.

I’m definitely going to give room service ago next time. It’s something I’ve never tried. I’m not one for eating breakfast in bed. I like to sit upright when I eat and not slouched against pillows, but eating in pyjamas is such a rare treat and I imagine that somehow you do feel just a bit spoilt having someone deliver a tray of goodies to your door. Yep, I’m definitely doing room service next time, especially as it’s included in the fare. Room service is available around the clock so if you get the munchies in the middle of the night all you have to do is pick up the phone.

Talking of breakfast, we did pop up to the beautiful Carinthia Lounge to see what was on offer and I must say that I enjoyed the small gourmet plate offerings. They are a little different than what the other dining venues serve. I had a spicy mixed bean with avocado one morning but you can have glass pots filled with granola, yogurt and fresh fruit or breakfast paninis. The small plate selections continue at lunch and there are cakes and pastries in the afternoon.

So, that covers the included dining options, now for the venues that you pay a premium for. There isn’t a huge selection compared to some of the big boy cruise ships but what there is, is very good and worth trying. As I mentioned before there are speciality restaurants in a section of the Kings Court and these vary depending on where you are sailing. We really enjoyed the Norwegian inspired dishes in Nordlys. As you can imagine fish was a highlight. We didn’t order it but our neighbouring table had the seafood platter and it was huge! On other nights, the restaurant became Coriander focusing on regional Indian dishes. On other cruises it might turn into Bamboo, serving pan Asian dishes or La Piazza for Italian dishes. We may have been in an area of the buffet but apart from the decor, you wouldn’t know it. We thoroughly enjoyed our meal. The food was delicious and we ate watching the slopes of the mountains tumbling down into the fjord glide by. We thought that it was well worth the $20 each supplement.

I was really looking forward to our meal in the Verandah Steakhouse and it didn’t disappoint. What a treat it was! It comes at a supplement of $45 each for dinner and was well worth it considering the quality of the food, level of service and extra touches. This is somewhere that you definitely want to dress up for if you book a table for dinner. The food is just sublime and those steaks are just the best. My only disappointment was that we didn’t get presented with a box of steak knives to choose from as we’d seen on Youtube videos. Mr R was happy about this as he thought that choosing a steak knife was a bit pretentious. For dessert I chose the rum baba. I wasn’t expecting a trolley to arrive and being asked which out of a selection of bottles which rum I wanted to choose to douse my baba in. To me, rum is rum so I just picked the nicest label. Mr R said that the cheese trolley had the best selection of cheese ever. We were taken a bit aback when given the wine menu. There was nothing on it the was within our drink package range. It was all very expensive but after a little chat with our waiter and him saying ‘ leave it with me’ he returned with a couple of glasses of very decent red wines that were within the drinks package and brought more when he noticed that our glasses were empty. Now that’s what I call great service. You can eat lunch at the Verandah with a shorter menu and a smaller supplement.

So, as you can see, you won’t go hungry on Queen Mary 2. Be prepared to feel pretty full by the end of the day and if you do feel your waistband getting tighter then I recommend a trip to the gym or take the stairs and not the lift.

One more post to go. Next time find out what you can do to keep you entertained on the ship.

Apologies for the lack of food shots. We were either too busy eating it or felt it was inappropriate to keep taking photos of our food when sharing a table