August 23, 2012 - Breakfast, A Feast of all Nations, Dinner – Duck and Bouramundi and Stilton

August 23, 2012 Breakfast - a Feast of all nations, Dinner – Duck and Bouramundi and Stilton

We went to the King’s Court which is a series of buffet lines of cold and hot foods.  After initially taking a cup of tea and a pastry, I discovered that several more lines of hot and cold foods were open. 

I was very impressed with the cold line that included both a large pile of fresh salad and salmon gravad lax, with capers, sour cream, chopped fresh dill weed and thinly sliced red onion and hard boiled eggs next to German mackerel in mustard sauce and another in tomato sauce.  Next to it was cold cuts of a very German nature and next to that, cheeses of a French nature.  Around the corner I found fruits and took a couple of slices of honey dew melon and two slices of orange.  So I filled my plate with some of the salmon and other accessories and drank a lemon tea with it.

Later I noticed that there was a hot line with pancakes and waffles and omelets of salmon and goat cheese and bacon and wild boar and apple sausage and grilled tomatoes and British things like baked beans and oatmeal, so I took an omelet and a couple of sausages that I shared with Suzette and some mango and kiwi slices.  The fruit juices a sweetened beyond what we are used to in the U.S. 

So on a whole the breakfasts are better in variety in the King’s Court and we shall be eating breakfasts there a lot.

After a lecture on the conflict in the middle east where the conclusion is that there is little or no progress toward democracy of the type we think of in the West and little prospect for any real reform in the near future, we went to the pavilion to sit and drink Bouvet Brut from Samur.

At 2:15 we went to the Theatre to see a presentation of Chaucer’s Tales originally performed at the Royal Shakespearean Theatre.  Then back for a nap and a shower and off to dinner.

At Dinner I chose a duck breast salad; thin slices of duck breast served on an Italian salad of string beans, peas and mayonnaise dressing.  Then I ordered bouramundi with a dab of baba ghanoush, on a bed of mashed potatoes.  The fish was very firm as if overcooked, so I asked for it to be undercooked and the waiter and the kitchen was kind enough to do that.  I learned two things from this experience.  First, the bouramundi fish is a very firm fish and it never gets soft, because the second time it was served almost raw and it still had a firm texture.  Second, all the fish is fresh on the menu.  What a nice surprise.

The menu has a cheese course in the desserts section, although you can have both a cheese course and a desert.  In fact, you can have anything on the menu and if you want more you can order two of an item.

The ship board food is plentiful and delicious.  What is dear and tightly controlled is the alcoholic beverages.  The Britannia Grille has a rather limited wine menu and it is quite expensive.  I would judge that Cunard marks up the wine about 4 times. The cheapest wine on the menu is a Cunard varietal at around $30.00 and things go up from there. 

Also, our wine steward, I would never use the word sommelier, seemed to be a Russian woman, who clearly had been given instructions to pour as much wine as possible into the glasses so one would need to buy more wine.  We spent about $250.00 for the five or six bottles of wine that we bought on the trip. What was done that I did like was that they would store the wine with our name on the bottle from meal to meal, so after we got used to the system, we simply bought a bottle of red and a bottle of white and drank glasses of each as we wished.  So we would have a glass of white with a fish appetizer and a glass of red with a beef or duck entrée.

After dinner, we saw “Hunger Games” in the theatre.  I really liked Woody Harrelson’s performance, but the plot was somewhat juvenile and so was the rest of the acting.  It was great to see a movie I would not normally pay to see in a theater but wanted to see, because Willy had recommended it in a theater,

Bon Appétit