My wife didn’t kill me when we reached our room and looking back on it now it’s hard to see how I managed to escape death. To recap, we’d mostly explored Gibraltar on foot and had returned to Emerald Princess a little earlier than we’d needed to on account of my wife aggravating an old injury to her leg during our ascent or descent along part of The Rock. Upon embarking we then headed to our room and it’s the manner in which we did so that caused me to flirt with what life I still had: we walked up. We walked up six decks to get to our room. I forced my wife with her injury to yet climb another twelve flights of stairs. I am a bad man.
In my defence, I wasn’t really thinking, which isn’t really a defence at all. You see, what usually happens when we board a ship at the same time as a lot of other people is that many of them will congregate around the elevator and there’s usually only one of them. We’re both considerate in that we like to allow the typically older or less able-bodied people boarding to have priority access, but we’re also both pretty misanthropic and introverted so we also don’t particularly like sharing a confined space with a lot of strangers. This means we don’t normally take the elevator or, more accurately, we don’t usually take that one. What we’ve found over the years is that the middle and aft entries to the ship are used more often than the front ones and we typically have a cabin near the front. So, what we tend to do is board in the middle, climb one flight of stairs to the lowest level of the piazza, then walk forward to the bank of four, mostly unused elevators there where we can take the easy way up the rest of the way without a crowd or huge delay. But on this occasion in Gibraltar’s port we boarded at the front. I, on automatic pilot, climbed a flight of stairs with my wife limping slightly behind me. That’s when it dawned on me that all we could do was keep walking or head away from our room towards the middle of the ship to then come back again because the only other alternative would be to wait for ages for an elevator to come that wasn’t rammed with people trying to get on.
Ah. Do you want to go back down and wait for a lift?
(through gritted teeth) Keep walking.
Or we could head towards the piazza. Get one of the lifts there. It’s a bit out of the way but…
(through gritted teeth) Keep walking.
Or we could call a lift going down. Get in it, ride it down one floor, then everyone else can get in but we’re guaranteed a spot.
(through gritted teeth) Keep walking.
Do you maybe want a rest on deck seven? We could hit a bar.
(conveyed through a death stare and without any words) Keep walking.
We may as well keep walking, I suppose.
We got back to our cabin, offloaded our purchases, and I stepped out on the balcony to take some photos of the port of Gibraltar while I waited for the sound of the door sliding open behind me and the inevitable sharp shove into my back that would have sent me to my doom below. I’d have deserved no less.
But, as I said, my wife didn’t kill me. Perhaps the walk had tired her out or perhaps she simply recalled to mind a quote from one of our favourite films – Revenge is a dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold – but for now I can confirm that I live.
We’d already decided before we booked this week-long cruise in the Mediterranean on Emerald Princess that we were going to go speciality-dining heavy for it on account of the number of venues aboard that we’d not seen before on any of the other Princess ships. We’d already dined at the Crown Grill the night before (a familiar location and a regular haunt for us on any cruise) as we’d been able to book that prior to embarkation and we had another night at the Share restaurant for later in the week to look forward to as well since that could be pre-booked too. For the other locations it wasn’t possible to book ahead of time online so we assumed these were more of your rock-up-and-see-if-there’s-a-table-free locations. Well… not quite. It turned out you still had to book those but you could do it on the day. We discovered this by chance as we wandered through the Wheelhouse Bar after freshening up and getting changed. The Salty Dog Gastropub is a section of the Wheelhouse on Emerald Princess and we spotted what looked like a dining appointment book near it. We found a member of staff and asked if we could just turn up later in the evening to dine and were informed that we’d need to book. We picked a time, glanced at the barely-filled page as the staff member scribbled down our name and room number, and that was it.
It was still late afternoon at this point and the cruise ship was getting closer to departing from Gibraltar so we made use of our loyalty status and headed up to the Elite Lounge for some nibbles and a cheaper-priced cocktail or two. Emerald Princess pulled away from the dock while we were there. After we’d had enough of cocktails we paid a visit to Vines for a glass of wine, then, because it still wasn’t close enough to our dining slot, we treated Explorers Lounge to our presence and grabbed another drink before eating up the last chunk of time ahead of dinner with a slow wander around the Promenade Deck as the sun setting behind the clouds painted the sky in a rainbow of colours. The video (temporarily removed) below the following photos of drinks contains some colourful shots from the starboard side and aft of the ship.
Salty Dog Gastropub
The time to dine finally arrived. The Salty Dog Gastropub, as has been mentioned, occupies a section of the Wheelhouse Bar, perhaps comprising a dozen or so high tables with stools on which to sit. For your $12 per person cover charge you get to pick two small plates of food and a dessert from the menu and you get access to some specialist cocktails too (for an additional cost, naturally). There’s also a whiskey selection, apparently, but you have to enquire about it and we didn’t realise it was an option until after the meal because the writing on the menu was small and the venue was dimly lit. Besides, I don’t want to enquire about whiskey; I want whiskey to tempt me; I want whiskey to flirt in front of my eyes and whisper naughty things like “I’m peaty with a fiery kick and you want to let me slide down your throat and warm you up” in a husky brogue.
The meal started with Ernesto Dip Sticks comprising of crunchy bread sticks, beer-cheddar fondue, and flaked, smoked salt. They were fine. They were bread sticks. There’s not a lot you can really say about bread sticks because there’s not a lot you can really get wrong with them or massively change without them then becoming not bread sticks. I was more impressed with my knife to be honest because I liked the curves and flat edges it sported. Here I am, expressing admiration for a piece of cutlery. That’s the sort of quality content I’m providing on this website free of charge.
We were keen to try one of the cocktails specific to the menu and we both ended up ordering the Salty Dog Smash. I can’t remember being overly wowed by it but it was nice to have something you couldn’t normally find elsewhere on the ship.
For the main meal my wife opted for the Lobster Mac & Cheese and the Beef Short Rib Poutine and you can see them both in the photo below. She reported that they were both good but nothing spectacular.
I felt compelled to try the Ernesto burger because it’s the big thing they promote on the website and around the ship in places with it apparently having been voted “Best Burger At Sea” by Cruise Critic. Ah, yes, votes by members of the public who have registered with an online cruising forum; that’s definitely the metric by which you should pick food. I also went for the Maryland-Style Jumbo Lump Crabcake. You can see both of these in the photo below.
The crabcake was very nice. I like sweet potato fries and these were very nice too.
About that Ernesto burger…
The meat was nice and tender and tasty. I have no problem with the meat of the burger. I do have a problem with the burger construction as a whole. To me, a burger is a fancy sandwich. You have a filling inside two pieces of bread. For a burger the filling is almost always a thick slice of meat with sauces and vegetables and the bread is a roll of some kind. You can either eat the burger in a fancy way – with a knife and fork – or you can eat it in the more common way – grabbing it with both hands and stuffing it in like that. In both cases the burger is supposed to be eaten in a way that you have a bit of all the individual pieces of it in every bite. The prerequisite to eating it that way, though, is that the burger – the buns, the meat, the additional fillings – must actually be able to fit in your mouth. This is not possible to do with the Ernesto. The picture may not do it justice but that burger sits about 12 centimetres in height. Figuratively, I’m known to have a bit of a big mouth. The physical reality, though, is that I am unable to dislocate my mandible and flip my head back on a neck hinge enough to be able to push the Ernesto into my gullet. Oh, and the beer-battered jalapeño: yeah, grim as hell. I did try it because you never know until you do so but I can categorically state that whoever suddenly thought “Ooh, I know how we can make this burger even taller and simultaneously introduce the texture of cracked rubber with all the taste of cracked rubber too” needs to be institutionalised.
Anyway, the dessert was nice. I had the Bourbon Chocolate Pot de Crème (pictured below) while my wife went with the Coffee & Doughnuts (strangely missing from the camera roll). We enjoyed both of them.
So, how did we feel about our Salty Dog Gastropub experience then? It was the better side of okay. We did like the venue; nice to be away from the main dining room and not in a particularly noisy or busy area. There were enough choices that we could go back a couple of times to try some different combinations of food, drink, and dessert, and the portion sizes were just about right. None of the food blew us away but there were no complaints with quality either. I’d say it’s worth a visit and the cover charge is reasonable.
Evening Aboard Emerald Princess
Our meal done and with us feeling pleasantly filled inside we made plans to head up to Skywalkers to see if DJ Mateo could entice us out onto the dance floor in order to work off some of those calories. However, it was still too early for Skywalkers so we headed for Club Fusion first at the aft of the deck we were on. Hailing from St Lucia, the band Topaz were playing in there and we enjoyed a drink while watching people strut their funky stuff to the live music.
We then jumped in the elevator straight to the top of the rear of the ship and Skywalkers for another drink and to grab our seat by the dance floor where we satisfied ourselves until tiredness overcame us with a little more people-watching and quite a lot of fun seeing fellow passenger trying to group dance to tracks such as The Cupid Shuffle and Wobble.
In the next post in this Emerald Princess series of travelogues I’ll cover the second full sea day of this week in the Mediterranean as the ship made its way from Gibraltar towards France. Movies, more speciality dining, and a good walk around the ship taking loads of photos can be expected to feature.