Dining on the Disney Dream

A good portion of cruisers will tell you that one of the main reasons why they cruise is because of the food.  And it’s not surprising – eating good food is a big part of vacation for me, since I try to stay relatively healthy at home.  Plus on a cruise ship your fare is mostly inclusive of the majority of food items.  So you can eat as much as you want since it’s already paid for!

We found the food to be of pretty good quality, and a good variety as well.  And the cast members on board definitely want to make sure you’re getting your fill – dinner is a 4 course meal (appetizer, soup or salad, entrée, and dessert) and our server would not let us pass on dessert, insisting on bringing something out anyway!  In the main dining rooms the food is all included so you can order multiple appetizers if they sound appealing or even multiple entrees if you’re hungry enough!

Since it’s Disney the dining on the Disney Dream is also really well themed.  The restaurants are beautiful and each location has its own style of cuisine.  While we didn’t try some of the extra fee specialty restaurants, I did want to talk about the main dining places we tried on our cruise.

Enchanted Garden

The Enchanted Garden is themed to look like, well, an enchanted garden!  It has lots of greens and flowers and is very beautiful.  When you first enter they have these really cool rounded booth tables.  We didn’t get to sit at one of those unfortunately but they looked neat!

The cuisine here is described by Disney as “market-fresh continental.”  I will say it was probably the least adventurous or exciting of the menus, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t tasty!  Some of the dishes we particularly enjoyed here included the lobster ravioli, sea bass, and sea scallops over pasta (yes, we obviously love seafood!).

Royal Palace

Of the main dining rooms, this one definitely has the fanciest feel to it.  If you like princesses and palaces it’s the place to be.  There’s lots of great little details, including Cinderella slippers on the chandelier and bread baskets shaped like the coach.  The appetizer of lobster and shrimp was quite good.  The pasta dish I had really had some weird flavor in it – I think it was tarragon, but it tasted like licorice and just didn’t seem to work very well for me.  The dessert I had here though was incredible.  The Grand Marnier soufflé was out of this world!

Animator’s Palate

This restaurant has the most “fun” feel to it.  When you walk in it’s decorated with Disney animation items, with sketches and statues hanging around and paintbrushes everywhere.  There are also TV screens throughout the room, where Crush makes an appearance and interacts with guests as they eat.  We were actually seated in the center of the room and were really too far away to be able to hear what was going on, so that was a little disappointing.

I had one of the specialty drinks here.  It was the Blueberrilicious  (Tequila, Fresh Blueberries,passion Fruit juice, triple Sec, Sour Mix) and it was a frozen drink and amazing.  Loved it.  I also really enjoyed my appetizer of the black truffle pasta and wished I could have had an entrée size portion of it!

Pirate Night

Something else that Disney does on their cruises is host a pirate night.  You’re sent to one of the 3 main dining rooms, but the menu that night is totally different – it’s very tropical themed.  Those sorts of flavors were right up my alley so I loved it!  I enjoyed fresh fruit with a delicious glaze, crab cakes, and a yummy dessert trio.

Cabanas

Cabana’s is the main buffet, and it’s certainly not bad for a buffet.  In fact, there were a couple of things I really enjoyed, and it was nice that the offerings changed a little bit from day to day so it wasn’t always exactly the same.

Palo and Remy

These two restaurants cost an extra fee, but they are supposed to be quite excellent.  Palo is the more affordable of the two, with upscale Italian food.  Remy is the ultimate fine dining experience with French cuisine.  We didn’t try either because it was our first Disney cruise and we wanted to enjoy the other places, but I’m sure we will eventually!

Other Places

Room service!

There are a number of other places on the ship to eat as well.  You can grab some basic counter service type food from Flo’s V-8 café.  We did this for lunch one day and just had the typical hamburgers, pizza, chicken fingers, fries, etc.  My husband got the special of the day here which was a Philly cheesesteak – but being from the Philadelphia area let’s just say he was not impressed.  There’s an ice cream machine where you can grab soft-serve ice cream, or you can pay a little extra for smoothies from Frozone treats.  But if it’s something cold you want I highly recommend Vanellope’s Sweets and Treats – I wrote a whole blog post about it, but it was delicious ice cream and gelato!

And finally, you can always order room service any time of day.  We didn’t do this for lunch or dinner, but we had breakfast delivered every morning.  While it was fairly basic stuff, it was really nice to get coffee and pastries delivered right outside our door every morning!

What food have you enjoyed on cruises?