Do Carnival Cruise Lines Customers Want A Sophisticated Dinner Menu?

Over the past 15 years, I’ve been on more than 10 cruises, cruising on Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, and Holland America. All have their pros and cons, but ultimately I keep coming back to Carnival, as it just suits me best. I’m a big foodie, and believe it or not, I’ve always preferred Carnival’s food to the other lines. So when I heard that Carnival was debuting a new dining concept, I was more than a little surprised.

Carnival debuted their new American TABLE and American FEAST dining concepts on the Carnival Glory last month, with plans to expand this dining concept to three other ships (Liberty, Imagination, Inspiration) next month. If these new menu items win over passengers, the new concepts are slated to go fleetwide through the remainder of 2014 and into 2015.

Now here’s the problem with this.. Carnival’s customers aren’t looking for pretentious food like this, they just want good tasting food and attentive service. They want giant shrimp cocktails as an appetizer, not frog legs provencal with herb butter. They want beef wellington, not free-range chicken with salsa verde and charred lemon. They want chocolate melting cake (every night), not warm date and fig pudding.

I’m still scratching my head trying to understand the logic in this. There’s no question that the quality of their food has gone downhill in recent years (it’s a main reason why I’ve tried other cruise lines), but rather than launching an entirely new menu concept (that likely won’t appeal to their clientele), they should address the problems with the existing menu instead.

The guys at Zydecocruiser posted the new Carnival Glory American TABLE and American FEAST Menus, and I’m really struggling with it. Many of the cruise forums have discussions over the new dining concepts, and the feedback isn’t very good at all. It should be interesting to see how Carnival reacts to the negative feedback over the coming months. If they hold firm, they might lose out on some loyal customers (like me).

What do you think of Carnival’s new dining concept?