Our day on French soil came to an end as we reboarded Emerald Princess in the port of Marseille. If you’ve read the previous posts in this cruise travelogue series then you’ll know that we spent the morning exploring Arles, once the home of Van Gogh, and the afternoon in the French commune of Les Baux-de-Provence, and if you haven’t read the previous posts then you wouldn’t have known that but can now feel enlightened to have had that information thrust your way.
Marseille wasn’t the most interesting of ports to gaze out upon but I’ve never let a little thing like interest dictate what I take photos and videos of before and I had no intention of starting on this cruise so please enjoy or suffer through (delete as applicable) some pictures taken from our balcony and a small piece of video of Emerald Princess sailing away from France.
SHARE By Curtis Stone
Let’s get onto the meat – quite literally – of this post and the reason you’re most likely reading this unless you’re taking part in a controlled experiment to see just how much misery the human mind can withstand, your arms strapped to a chair, your eyes held open by staples as page after page of some of the worst content on the internet is slowly scrolled past your unblinking, terrorised form. You’d be surprised how many visitors to this site are in that demographic.
One of the many things we were excited about regarding this cruise on Emerald Princess was that it would be the first ship in the Princess Cruises fleet that we would travel on which featured the relatively new speciality dining venue of SHARE by Curtis Stone. We love Crown Grill and we love Sabatini’s, two stalwarts of the Princess experience, but we also just love eating in general so the chance to try out something new was too good to pass up. We’d booked SHARE online prior to the cruise and the day we’d picked was this one in Marseille so the evening saw us getting ready to see how it would compare to the other restaurants.
SHARE is located at the aft of Deck 16 next door to a small lounge we’d loved on the Crown Princess cruise to the Baltics, Adagio, and it was to Adagio that we headed prior to our dining slot in order to have a pre-dinner drink. We were the only people there. Please pretend that there is a lamentation about the removal of the BOGO hour here because I’m tired of writing it out in full but never want to let Princess get away with quietly removing it from their ships. Anyway, the drinks were nice even if I can’t remember what we ordered.
At the appropriate time – that’s dead on the dot in case your awareness of what constitutes appropriateness when it comes to time-keeping is concerned is lacking (my family, I’m looking at you right now) – we walked the couple of metres from our seats in the lounge to the SHARE restaurant and were quickly seated.
The important first order of business was, of course, choosing wine to go with the meal. No, we didn’t pick the $989 bottle. The Zinfandel we went with was okay but still suffered from the same problem all red wines on Princess suffer from (in addition to the exorbitant markup) in that it was thinner than we prefer. There’s possibly a reason why the cruise line finds it impossible to stock a full-bodied red but Princess haven’t seen fit to share it with me. It’s something we’ve just learnt to accept onboard and moan about online every time we get a chance. Like now.
To the main menu, then, and as you can see there are six courses in a SHARE dining experience with a choice of two or three options in each course. I’ve no idea whether this menu changes on occasion or seasonally or geographically depending on availability but I’d like to hope so as otherwise the limited number of combinations will lower the likelihood of return visits to the restaurant for diners like us who want to try new things as much as possible.
There was bread on the table which always warms my half-Irish heart and our first courses turned up. I chose the Charcuterie while my wife opted for the only other choice, the Taleggio Cheese with Accompaniments. I don’t like cheese so this was an easy decision for the pair of us to reach and while the restaurant is called SHARE and you are encouraged to share I was happy to not do so for this course. The accompaniments to the cheese were olives which, as anyone who’s read formal night cruise posts on this site will know, belong in a Vodka Martini and then only temporarily until they are binned. Olives are not for eating. That’s not up for discussion.
Course two – the salad; something we would never deliberately pick – saw my wife select the Tomatoes and Burrata while I went for the Asparagus and Radish. Weirdly, for me this was the stand-out dish. The textures and tastes of my salad, helped a lot by the really fresh pesto, was just about perfect.
Pasta was the third course and for me this was the Pork Ravioli while my wife selected the only other choice, Ricotta Tavatelli. The green curry filling in the ravioli was why my wife didn’t opt for that as she’s not a curry person at all. I’m not a curry person either but, you know, for science there’s little I won’t try once. It was quite nice.
The only course at SHARE where we didn’t actually offer to share any of our food with each other was the seafood course where the lure of crab and eggs was too much for both of us to resist. That sounds awful now that I read that back. The Alaska King Crab was very nice, however, and I thought the textures on the dish combined really well again.
The penultimate course produced what my wife thought was the best dish of her selection, Strip Loin Steak, “perfectly balanced deliciousness” in her own words and yet she’s not a professional restaurant critic! What gives!? I chose the Duck Leg Confit. Very tasty.
As I’d gone for the Dark Chocolate Crémeux that only left Toffee Cheesecake for my wife’s dessert choice because you’d need to put a gun to her head to get her to eat marzipan and that would only occur accidentally after her head slammed forward into the foodstuff as she’d request death first. She’s not the biggest fan of marzipan. The desserts we selected, though, were both very good indeed.
As I’ve already indicated, there’s a potential lack of combinations if the menu doesn’t change but that’s about the only small negative I can bring up about our speciality dining evening at SHARE. We really enjoyed the themed courses, the textures and tastes were fantastic, the portion sizes were just right, the variety of food in each course was good, and there was a definite sense that everything really was special and none of the courses were just slightly fancier dishes than you’d get in the main dining room.
The final positive to report was that the restaurant venue itself was perfect with a gorgeous view out over the aft as the sun started to dip in the Mediterranean.
We’d certainly dine at SHARE again.
In the next post from this cruise travel diary series I’ll cover the first part of the first of our Italian port stops while on Emerald Princess.