Part two of our travelogue series covering our weekender cruise aboard Scarlet Lady, the first cruise ship from Virgin Voyages, picks up right where the first part left off, and if you’ve not read about our rather fancy cabin or seen the photos and video of the departure past Portsmouth’s historic dockyard then now’s your big chance to rectify that by clicking here – Seriously Suite Departure From Portsmouth – before popping back here to continue.
In this post I’ll cover what we got up to on our first night aboard Scarlet Lady. If you’ve read travelogues elsewhere on this site or if you’ve met us in real life or if you’ve parsed the title of this post using your expert comprehension of English then you’ve probably guessed that the words “food” and “drink” will feature heavily. You would be absolutely right.
Scarlet Lady Test Kitchen
Virgin do things a little differently from most cruise lines, and certainly a lot different to all the cruise lines with whom we’ve sailed over the years. The idea of one or more main dining rooms has been made to walk the plank and sent to a watery grave, replaced instead by smaller, more specialised restaurants. This transforms the cruise experience on Scarlet Lady into one of regular speciality dining nights, but with no additional cost for the food. Those restaurants on the cruise ship can be broadly grouped into two types: themed and experiential. Both types feature a limited menu range, although the themed restaurants will have more choices. This simplifies what the kitchens aboard need to stock and what the chefs aboard need to know how to cook, but it also means they can do this cooking very well.
Prior to the cruise we were able to make bookings for restaurants, but only the experiential ones. In order to ensure that everyone gets a chance to try the food they like you’re only allowed to book once per location initially with the possibility of more spaces becoming available once you’re aboard and a wait-list of some description comes into play. Very sensible, and we liked this approach a lot. The only experiential restaurant we wanted to try for this taster cruise was The Test Kitchen and we booked it for the first night on Scarlet Lady.
Of course, we didn’t go straight to dinner. Animals go straight to dinner without a drink first, and we’re not animals. We made our way to On The Rocks for a couple of cocktails.
How to describe the Test Kitchen as a dining experience? Well, you know those intimate, candle-lit locations, ideal for dining for two, the quiet murmur of low conversations across the table from one another? This was like not that. If you’ve got working eyeballs then you can see from the photos below anyway, but think of it as part modern laboratory, part we’ve-moved-all-the-seats-into-the-restaurant-kitchen. Bright. Very bright. Very clean. Rather noisy. Different. Different is what Virgin do a lot of.
Food options here were limited to either vegetarian or non-vegetarian, with the latter adding a further one-course option switch between beef and venison. It was always going to be venison for the pair of us. In addition, there was an option to pay for either a wine or cocktail pairing alongside each course. Not being fans of white wine and knowing how much these pairing menus love to slip those in, and since we’d been on the cocktails already, we opted for the latter. This was $35 per person and included six small cocktails.
First up was a mushroom-shaped paté. I’m not a fan of mushroom (that’s an understatement) and it’s more a texture thing than taste (although quite why anyone likes the taste of soggy cardboard left in the ground is another thing altogether), but when it comes to fancy restaurants I will tend to give the chefs the benefit of the doubt that they know what they’re doing. This was lovely. The same can’t be said for the accompanying cocktail which bore all the flavour of fizzy water, but I’m pleased to say that the cocktails did improve from this low point as the courses proceeded. As to whether the cocktails truly paired with the courses: I’m not so sure. Then again: who cares? They’re cocktails!
Arriving under a smoky cloche was the next course, called “Egg”. I think you can see why.
Seafood is something I’m not a fan of. Fish, I like, but once you hit molluscs and arthropods in the animal kingdom then it’s pretty much a big no from me. However, again, when in a speciality dining establishment, do what the speciality dining establishmentarians do. I’m assured by my wife that the scallops were lovely. I ate them.
The main course of venison then arrived with a layered potato side dish. Now we’re talking! This was all absolutely top stuff. The quality of the meat, the combination of flavours with the sauces, and the presentation were far beyond pretty much any meal we’ve had at sea, and ran some snazzy land-based restaurants close too. And, of course, potato: I’m half-Irish and you can’t go wrong with serving me potato. It triggers my happiness hormones.
From the utterly delectable to the borderline gag-inducing with the next course of blue cheese. I don’t like cheese. Again, it’s a texture thing usually, because I can handle melted cheese but nothing hard. Food with the consistency of erasers on the ends of pencils is a red flag from nature. The taste is mostly irrelevant because I’ll only ever have it with other things that actually have a flavour I like. The same cannot be said for blue cheese, though. I can tell from the look and smell of blue cheese that no, no thank you, no thank you at all is the only answer when it comes to that. The blue cheese course at the Test Kitchen was shaped like a caterpillar for some reason. The taste was indescribably bad to me. The texture was right at the limit of my coping powers. I did, however, soldier through this revolting lump of putrescence. To give balance to this review of this particular course of the meal, both my wife – a huge fan of all types of cheese – and the couple next to us – apparently also cheese people – all agreed it was not pleasant either. That’s not to say that you wouldn’t like it. You might be a complete weirdo. You’re reading this and that gets you weirdo points already.
Anyway, we all ate it. Just.
So, finally, the dessert course, and how could it be anything other than chocolate? Everyone, thankfully, loves chocolate, and this was an excellent finish to the meal, with a nice mix of textures again.
Is the Test Kitchen worth a booking on Scarlet Lady? Of course! It’s free, and there are other places to eat around the ship if you don’t like what you’re served. You’re on a cruise. You can eat pretty much non-stop, so why wouldn’t you try this? We loved the aspect of thinking “Yeah, we’re not in the main dining room of a cruise ship” here, it was great to watch the chefs preparing the courses, and the quality of the food – even if not everything suits every individual’s palate – couldn’t be faulted. You don’t know until you try, though.
To round off and make our evening at the Test Kitchen on Scarlet Lady even better was the company we had on our section of bench in the restaurant. We were lucky enough to be seated beside Lieutenant Commander Natalie and her mum, Kim. The Lieutenant Commander should have been on this weekender cruise with her husband but he’d been called up to head out to Afghanistan at short notice, much to the absolute joy of Kim who then got to take his place on this trip. The other thing that Kim enjoyed was that her daughter outranked her son-in-law. We all talked for ages, comparing how we felt about the dishes in the restaurant, talking about other cruises – well, that’s an unwritten law of all dinner conversations on cruise ships, after all -, and numerous other topics too, and talked so long that by the time we decided we ought to give the staff a chance to clean our area of the restaurant there were probably only half a dozen other people still in there. A good night at the Test Kitchen would be the conclusion here.
Late Night On Scarlet Lady
The good thing about the meal we’d just had, with its many but perfectly-sized courses, followed by the long conversation with people we’d just met, was that when we left we weren’t bloated. We’re used to speciality dining on cruises ensuring you feel like you’ve had value for money, and because cruising is a very American-oriented thing “value for money” is typically synonymous with “quantity, quantity, quantity”. We’d much prefer fine dining that feels like it’s special and that’s what we experienced on Scarlet Lady throughout this cruise.
So, we weren’t full, and we were on a fancy ship, and it was late, and we’d been drinking cocktails since the early afternoon. What are a couple to do? Head to a bar. A quick stroll brought us to the Sip Lounge and we picked a couple of drinks from the menu there while watching the odd person or two wander through. In truth, it was a bit quieter than we’d expected, even allowing for the reduced capacity cruise numbers. We’d anticipated more people up and about into the early hours.
Seeking something more engaging, we headed off towards the aft of the ship and stumbled into the Arcade. This was heaven. For people of a certain age – and we’re people of a certain age – this was noisy neon nostalgia. We were here ages, playing most of the games, playing them really badly, listening to loads of 1980s pop music, and having a fabulous time. That 1980s music is the reason I’ve had to replace the audio in the video I took here with something non-copyrighted (see the description on YouTube for more details).
Finally sated of video arcade entertainment for this first night, we continued aft, through the Dock House (where we grabbed ourselves another cocktail each; maritime law, and all that) and then outside to drink under the stars. And not just under the stars, as we spotted a couple of Perseid meteors burning up in the night sky too.
By the time we headed back inside we found the bars had closed, but we knew that Scarlet Lady’s nightclub, The Manor, was still an option. We negotiated the mirrored walk to the interior and survived about ten minutes before the type of music being played persuaded us that there was a better option if we wanted a nightcap. Thus it was – after missing the exit and ending up on the upper level of the club initially; seriously, those mirrors and late-night drinking are not a great combination – that we made our way back to our room and its free bar, there to enjoy a bourbon on the balcony before bed.
In the third part of this Scarlet Lady cruise travelogue series I’ll cover the next day at sea on this Virgin Voyages ship. It would be a day recovering from a hangover (for some reason), one that includes dining at the Italian restaurant on the ship, and concluding with the line’s signature Scarlet Night.