Is Royal Caribbean Speciality Dining worth it?

Billed as an elevated dining experience, in themed restaurants, speciality dining is big business for cruises. An upchagre on your base cruise price (which includes main dining), is it worth the extra cost?

Chops Grille Key Lime Pie

Experience

As speciality dining is an upchagre, you’re going to get experienced waiting staff whose sole aim is to provide you with an experience you won’t get in main dining, or hopefully won’t forget. That’s not to say the quality and standard of service in main dining isn’t good, but when you’re shelling out over and above your cruise base cost, it should be better.

You should be getting a warm welcome to the restaurant and seated quickly. This is certainly our experience of speciality dining. Once shown to your seat you can expect your waiter to introduce themselves and give you a run down of service before offering the wine list and letting you settle into your table and surroundings. Throughout our experiences we’ve found waiting staff to be really personable - they have more time to spend with you than main dining and can go the extra mile. This is by no means a swipe at main dinning (there’ll be a blog next on Main Dinning experience and menus) but it’s a completely different experience, much slower paced with as much or little interaction as you want.

However, you should bear in mind that whilst service and standards should remain consistent across the Royal brand, it can differ from ship to ship and crew to crew.

Chops Grille Menu - A speciality dining restaurant by Royal Caribbean

Chops Grille

A classic American steakhouse - Chops Grill is on most ships. It has a smart casual dress code and open for dinner. It’s also open for lunch on sea days. Appetizers, Soups & Salads, Mains, Sides and Puds. Usually you can choose one from each section but each time we’ve been, a few extra sides always landed on our table.

There is a lot of food and it’s all so good, you just have to make room for everything. We did find this time, the portions were smaller than previously but we were still stiffed by the end of the meal.

The Tuna Tartare and Grilled Pepper Black Bacon are real highlights from the appetizers. We’ve probably had most of the mains too and definitely eaten all of the side options. From the mains, the lamb was absolutely delicious and what else would you have at a steakhouse but filet of course. The food here has been excellent as has the service. It’s not as busy an experience as Wonderland (see below) and you need the time to get through the volume. Being speciality you can of course have the service tailored and nothing is too much trouble for the waiting staff.

Key Lime Pie anyone? A must for dessert.

Chops Grille is probably my favourite speciality restraint and I would definitely go again. But mrsteamfivetravels prefers Izumi.

Izumi - Royal Caribbean

The Japanese restaurant serving sushi, sashimi and nigiri. Izumi is again available on many of the Royal Caribbean fleet.

This is a four course meal - one starter, two mains and a dessert. There’s also a kids menu if your little ones aren’t adventurous. Izumi was a great experience, the waiting staff were really personable and excellent with the kids. This was a very traditional Japanese restaurant with an authentic experience.

From prawn firecracker spring rolls to snow backed crab and salmon dynamite roll you’ve plenty of choice. There’s also the traditional mochi ice cream (below) for dessert which was fantastic. If you’d prefer something less traditional for dessert you can always opt of the chocolate lava cake.

Ice cream - Izumi Royal Caribbean

Wonderland

Alice in wonderland, mad hatter themed - a journey of food re-imagined.

Magical Mushroom Garden - Wonderland

Wonderland is probably the most ‘different’ restaurant on the speciality dining option. Not everything will be for everyone in this one. With options like (liquid lobster (Bone Marrow, Caviar)), if you’re not adventurous with your food then this may not be for you. Otherwise, if you want full flavour in mad hatter style, Wonderland should be on your list. On first visit it certainly provides the wow factor but I would question whether it looses appeal after more than one visit. On our recent visit the service was good but not on par with previous occasions. The food still hit the spot but in order for Wonderland to keep you going back, the menu needs to evolve. If you’ve never been I don’t think it will disappoint but if I had the option again, I’d probably pick one of the other restaurants.

Price and final thoughts…

If you’re a foodie after a bit of luxury and an elevated experience, then speciality dining is for you. It’s not as expensive as the drinks packages and so far we’ve found the 3 meal package the best value.

This time we paid around £330 for two adults to eat at 3 restaurants. Tips are an optional extra. The cover charge for children is minimal - depending on age. Children 12 and over are around $15. Adding it all up, it was around £30.00 per person, per meal, for two adults and two children.

If you have a drinks package you can use this at any speciality dining restaurant as long as the drinks you order are included. If you’re on the premium package you won’t have an issue. See our blog on Royal Caribbean drinks packages - link below.

As with the drinks packages, Royal Caribbean will put sales on the specialty dining packages, pre-cruise. Depending on your sailing, the dining may or may not sell out. If it doesn’t sell out pre-cruise, they will offer discounts or try to sell it to you for dining slots not yet filled. If you want to guarantee your spot, get it pre-cruise when you see a good price and reserve as early as possible. Otherwise you probably won’t miss out much price wise by waiting until you’re on board.

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