Caribbean Pearls- Oceania Marina-Feb 2012

MemberErik
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Re: Caribbean Pearls- Oceania Marina-Feb 2012

Postby MemberErik » Tue Feb 28, 2012 12:14 pm

Jacques
Another attractive specialty restaurant (French) with cuisine developed by Jacques Pepin, the host of numerous PBS cooking shows, who often sails with Oceania in an official capacity. The menu is quite traditional, executed beautifully. The pace of the meal, even in this French restaurant was rather brisk, at least for a table of 2.

Polo
This is the steakhouse venue and the décor is predictably wood and dark fabrics, they have beautiful cabinetry for high end wines, etc. The service was very attentive, including the wine staff. The beef is billed as “Prime” but we found both the NY Strip and Rib eye steaks as being tougher than we are used to in prime steaks, perhaps there is a grading within “prime”. They also serve all the traditional side dishes, creamed spinach, sautéed mushrooms, hash browns, etc. It should be noted that on Crystal we also find most of the steaks tougher than we like, the Chateaubriand on the “French Night” menu and the Wagu beef in Nobu are the exceptions.

Toscana
Toscana is the Italian venue and it seemed to also be the hardest “get” for reservations, at least on our cruise. The Maitre d’ is familiar to past Crystal passengers as he is the former Maitre d at Prego on the Crystal Symphony. The Veal Milanese (the menu has a different name) was terrific, so good we had it on our visit to this restaurant and also from room service on Valentine’s day.

Baristas
This is the specialty coffee venue, I think the hours are 6am to 6pm or similar, They have Italian baristas making Espresso, Cappucinos, etc. Baristas overlooks the pool and is next to the Computer room and Library. Overall, I have to give the “best coffee” award to Oceania, they use the Italian coffee brand “ILLY” in all their venues and it is much richer and flavorful than the coffee on Crystal, except for the bistro. The “Bistro” on Crystal has an edge over “Baristas” due to the buffet (now with enhanced evening hours as well), Baristas is solely a coffee venue.

MemberErik
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Re: Caribbean Pearls- Oceania Marina-Feb 2012

Postby MemberErik » Tue Feb 28, 2012 12:19 pm

Horizons
Horizons is the view lounge, it is the largest of the cocktail venues and is used for Captain’s and Oceania club parties, etc. It is also the usual venue for Bingo. It also has a continental breakfast set-up that is very under-utilized, in fact one morning when I was there, it was only populated by the spa attendants from the Canyon Ranch Spa directly down stairs, a quiet spot for coffee and a croissant.

The Terrace Restaurant
Open for three meals a day, this is the buffet venue. We had breakfast here every day and lunches when we ate lunch onboard. It is not a serve yourself buffet, the attendants will fill your plate for you (which took a little getting used to, but did seem to help alleviate the old biddies that pick their salad leaf by leaf). At night, they put out the white tablecloths, but this is the “casual” venue and nice shorts and shirt are acceptable here. It should be noted that they serve the same menu as the Grand Dining Room, but in buffet form. Being used to the enthusiastic service by the “Lido guys” on Crystal, we found the service by the beverage servers to be somewhat indifferent and slow, at least until we found the stations of the more efficient servers.

The Oceania Lounge
This is the theater venue, with theater seating, they serve drinks prior to shows and have little pull up tables on the chairs to hold your drinks, the sightlines are not great for shorter folks (or so I’m told) but the leg room is very comfortable. On our cruise, they used this as a show venue, muster drill and tender boat assembly room, a movie theater and a place to watch the Superbowl on a large screen. I hate to say it but we never made it to a show, they have one per night at about 9:30 pm or so and probably due to spending most days in the hot Caribbean sun, we were strictly early to bed on this cruise.

Marybeth
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Re: Caribbean Pearls- Oceania Marina-Feb 2012

Postby Marybeth » Tue Feb 28, 2012 3:04 pm

I am really enjoying your reports. Thanks for doing this for us.

MemberErik
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Re: Caribbean Pearls- Oceania Marina-Feb 2012

Postby MemberErik » Thu Mar 01, 2012 10:51 am

La Reserve
We received and happily accepted an invitation to the La Reserve for cocktails and dinner. We have never experienced the Vintage room on Crystal but I believe the experience is quite similar. Oceania and Wine Spectator magazine have teamed up to create 2 separate -7 course dinners (served on alternate evenings), each course is perfectly paired with a wine (including dessert). Each food course and wine is introduced prior to eating and a take-away menu is provided so that you will not have to remember each wine after drinking all 7 (plus a champagne kir at cocktail time). A wonderful evening, of course both the food courses and wine pours were somewhat smaller than usual, but with 7 courses this is too be expected. This experience usually sells for $95 per person and can be booked online prior to getting on board or once you board the ship. It seemed to be quite popular. Note: Some substitutions to the menu are allowed, ex. Seafood allergies, etc. make them aware of them at time of booking.

Misc. notes on Food and Beverage

Bars
They offer 2 for 1 drinks from 5-6pm in all bar venues; I think this is every day. The 2 for 1 drinks are very specific, you must order 2 of the exact same drink, not just the same price (don’t ask me why?) and not all drinks are included. The Captain’s Party with Officer introductions, etc. is in the Horizons lounge, but free drinks are offered in all bar venues during that hour. I believe the Oceania club party is only in Horizons and is only supposed to be for returning guests but we received an invite. They bring one of those silver things with 3 cups (peanuts, potato chips and a trail mix) with the drink orders to nibble on. Crystal provides those ceramic bud vases with the “nibble of the day” inside.

Food
We felt that the food quality was consistently very good to excellent in every venue we tried, this seems to be a huge theme for Oceania reviews and we concur. We have always felt that Crystal’s food was also of the highest quality but it suffers from sameness and because there are fewer venues and therefore one eats so many more meals in the Main Dining Room, the menus become repetitive. We have to give the edge to Oceania, at least on the Marina, for the quality and variety they offer.

Evening dress code
We feel strongly about Oceania having a casual venue for dinner daily, where after a long day of touring, etc. you can go back to your cabin, take a quick shower, put on a clean pair of shorts and shirt and have an easy meal. The other dinner venues require slacks for the men (Country Club Casual), this is more the way we choose to travel now, it also requires less space in our suitcases. We saw plenty of men in jackets, but no ties. We each brought a jacket and so we did wear it one night, but never felt we needed it, at least on this Caribbean itinerary. We would probably always bring a jacket on a European itinerary as we would likely need it at a restaurant before or after our cruise anyway.

Service
Crystal is proud of their staff, many of which have been with them for many years, because of this; they always have a core of staff that truly understands the “Crystal way” of doing things. On Marina, the newest of Oceania’s ships, (for another month or so) they don’t have that same core of individuals who really understand the level of service expected of them. Many of the staff are new or from other ships and lines with lower standards of service, this, unfortunately makes a difference, I think this will improve with time and training. Another thing is that because there is no assigned seating, the tips for all go into a pool and everyone gets their share based on the number of people on board rather than by providing excellent service throughout the cruise to a select number of people. One can tip extra, but because you may have only had a server for one meal, there is little incentive to do so.

MemberErik
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Re: Caribbean Pearls- Oceania Marina-Feb 2012

Postby MemberErik » Sat May 12, 2012 8:31 am

This is the final installment of this review that I somehow forgot to post here earlier.


Tendering to Shore

Sailing on Crystal for 20 cruises, I have never given too much thought to tendering, It has always been very efficient and easy. Basically, we have either gone down to the tenders when our excursion was loading or at our leisure when not on an excursion and I don’t think we have ever had to wait more than 10- 15 minutes to embark a tender, we’ve never had to plan ahead to get ashore.
On our Oceania cruise we had 3 tender ports, on the first of these ports, Virgin Gorda, we had no tour or particular activity but a Noon lunch reservation at the Little Dix Bay resort. During breakfast we heard the announcements that tenders were loading and there wasn’t any waiting but it was much too early to go ashore on a Caribbean island especially when we had nothing in particular to do for 4 hours. At about 10am we went down to the Marina lounge which was the staging point for the tendering operations. We then got in line to get our colored ticket, which was color coded to our assigned tender (the tickets were laminated so this wasn’t the first time this procedure was required). We were then asked to take a seat until our color was called. We quickly found out there were about 3 tender colors ahead of ours. Luckily, (for us) it was at about this time that some people holding tickets for earlier tenders started getting irritated and restless and decided not to go ashore at all, of course, I quickly traded our tickets for theirs and we were on the next tender loading (it was still 30-45 minutes from the time we first came down to the time we were in the tender heading for the Virgin Gorda Yacht club). Tendering in St. Barts, we had a short wait but it may have been later as I remember people were already returning from port when we were in line to board. Dominica was the last tender port and we had very little interest in this port so we decided to spend the day at the pool onboard rather than tender in.
The Crystal Ships and Marina are roughly the same size so I would think that the operations would run relatively similar. The major difference that I could see was that on Crystal, the Filipino crew pilot the tenders and are supervised by the ships officers on either end with walkie talkies and they always have a minimum of one tender at the ship and one at the dock and two travelling in opposite directions between them. The tenders leave the dock or the ship when another tender arrives. On Marina, the ships officers pilot the tenders so perhaps they are unable to drop as many tenders during peak times? I don’t know exactly what the problems are but they need to be studied and improved. Unless tendering procedures improve, I would definitely be reluctant to book any itinerary on the Marina or Riviera that required a lot of tendering.

Pool

The pool area is very large and there is lots of seating in both sunny and shaded areas. The deck above the pool is a mostly sunny area surrounding the pool area , although somewhat less accessible to the pool itself. The seating is primarily chaises with thick cushions and terry cloth covers, I think the chaises are more comfortable than the chaises on Crystal. The pool itself also seems slightly larger and perhaps a bit deeper, it was fine for me but challenging for some to touch bottom.
Chair saving, putting an inexpensive personal item (tanning lotion) or a book from the ships library on a chair before breakfast to “save” it for a mid-afternoon dip, seems to be tolerated on Marina. We saw a lot of this practice. This is not to say it never happens on Crystal, but I have also seen the “Lido guys” there remove these articles to allow others to use the chair, they also seem to have a better handle on quickly changing out used chair covers and removing dirty towels from unoccupied pool furniture.

Televison

The satellite television stations seem to be adequate but I might add a classic movie channel like TCM or similar to the mix. The ships programming, however, tend to be very repetitive, we caught the same sitcom episodes days apart, the movies were frequently repeated as well.


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