Contrariwise the Wizardly

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I had the great fortune to spend the last week or so sailing along Alaska’s inside passage on the NCL Jewel. Being the kind of person that I am, I gave myself a side-quest on day one: eat at and review each of the on-board dining options. I mostly succeeded, with two notable exceptions. It turns out a reservation at the Teppanyaki restaurant is incredibly difficult to score, and I simply ran out of time for the steakhouse.

But First, the Rubric

Taking inspiration from Michelin stars, I decided to categorize each dining option with the Contrariwise Boat Emoji System. Boatmoji if you will.

  • 0 (Zero) boats - Anything I wouldn’t expressly recommend. Runs the gamut from terrible to basically fine. Might be perfectly cromulent, but doesn’t stand out.
  • 1 (One) boats 🛳️ - Worth a visit. If it requires a reservation, consider making one.
  • 2 (Two) boats 🛳️🛳️ - Plan around it. Get at least one reservation, at any day or time you can, and schedule other things to accommodate.
  • 3 (Three) boats 🛳️🛳️🛳️ - Vacation highlight. Take a cruise specifically to go to this restaurant.

The Restaurants

O’Sheehans

  • Rating: 0 boats
  • Style: Casual
  • Cuisine: Bar food

Generally speaking, O’Sheehans had both the worst food and worst service of the trip. It’s the kind of place you go to kill 1.5 hours waiting on the smallest plate of nachos you’ve seen in your life. As everywhere on the boat, the staff were both patient and kind. I think the delays were frequently because the O’Sheehans kitchen is also providing room service, and so no matter how busy (or not) the restaurant appeared to be, I suspect there were at least double as many tickets accounted for by room service requests.

The nominal benefit of O’Sheehans is that it’s open 24 hours, has no dress code, and no reservations. But I think I’d recommend the buffet categorically over O’Sheehans at any time when the buffet is open and operating.

Speaking of…

Garden Cafe (The Buffet)

  • Rating: 0 boats
  • Style: Buffet
  • Cuisine: Rotating

Buffet (noun): the opportunity to eat as much as you would like of food that would not be acceptable at any other time.

Jokes aside, I actually rather liked the buffet, and I think it’s the “set point” for all other on-ship dining. O’Sheehans falls slightly below, most other things are equal are slightly above. The buffet is fine. It never really excelled, but it was reliable. It always made for a quick breakfast or lunch, but I never made it for dinner generally preferring to work on my quest to eat at every other option. I think the buffet is never the wrong option, especially if you’re in a hurry or don’t want to wait to be seated.

Le Bistro

  • Rating: 🛳️ (1 Boat)
  • Style: Fine Dining
  • Cuisine: French

Le Bistro is the one place on the ship that had a dress code, and despite a few ruffled feathers about whether or not my collared sweater qualified (it did,) I had a mostly pleasant experience. I think that other options on the boat win for atmosphere, but the food here never disappointed. I can strongly recommend both the escargot and the french onion soup. There are other restaurants on the ship that will claim to have french onion, but none of them will be as good as what Le Bistro serves.

What really stole the show for me was the dessert at Le Bistro, a strawberries and cream fraisier with pistachio topping. I would rank it as “dangerously good” and worth the price of admission alone.

Chin Chin

  • Rating: 🛳️ (1 Boat)
  • Style: Casual
  • Cuisine: Chinese

We had to wait an hour to sit at Chin Chin, and I can see why. I ordered the kung pao chicken and I’m somewhat at a loss for how to describe it. Spicy teriyaki chicken? Clearly non-traditional, none of the flavors that I expected, and yet somehow still incredible. Maybe they went with that name due to familiarity, maybe they just don’t know how to make kung pao and lucked into something that works? I won’t fault them for the non-traditional take, because it so clearly worked and was clearly at least inspired by kung pao with a spice that both built and lingered. A friend had many compliments about their chicken fried rice, and several people got calamari that was lightly fried but not chewy, the hallmark of well-prepared squid.

The highlight of my dinner at Chin Chin was actually a cross-order which deserves its own section…

Sushi (by way of Chin Chin)

  • Rating: 🛳️🛳️ (2 Boats)
  • Style: Counter seating
  • Cuisine: Sushi

It’s possible to book directly into the sushi restaurant, but it can also be ordered from Chin Chin, which is what I did in order to save time. I can’t overstate how good it was; at $11 for two pieces of nigiri, it had better have been. But I want to be clear, the sushi on board the NCL Jewel is among the best I’ve ever had.

La Cucina

  • Rating: 0 boats
  • Style: Casual
  • Cuisine: Italian

The vibe, as they say, was immaculate. Better than Le Bistro’s no doubt. But the food didn’t live up to the same expectation. It was fine, maybe even two points north of acceptable. But hard to recommend. If you like Olive Garden, you’ll like La Cucina. I think the gnocchi where my highlight, and probably the best gnocchi I had all week.

Azura / Tsar’s Palace

  • Rating: 0 boats
  • Style: Casual
  • Cuisine: Rotating

Azura and the Tsar’s Palace are two sides of the same coin. Either or both could be referred to as “main dining,” with the only real difference between them being the ambiance and decor. I will note that we found the service in Tsar’s Palace to be slightly more reliable. Nominally the more casual option, Azura, reminded me of just about every “fast-casual” restaurant I’ve eaten at.

The food choices changed slightly throughout the week, but were generally the kind of thing you might find at Chili’s or Applebees, and about the same quality overall. Tsar’s palace offered the same menu, but with an interior designed to evoke old-style regal charm. For what it’s worth, the palace also had bathrooms inside the restaurant, a rare luxury on the Jewel.

Moderno Churrascaria

  • Rating: 0 boats
  • Style: Buffet
  • Cuisine: Brazilian

In what I’m certain will be my most controversial opinion, Moderno was… Okay? I guess? I’m not convinced it was better than Garden Cafe, except that I paid $70 for it. Like other Brazilian Steakhouses the gimmick is mostly that people walk around and carve fresh hunks of animal directly on to your plate. I’m mostly of the opinion that those animal hunks were… Fine? I guess? Neither the quality nor flavor really stood out from among all the other animal hunks I had on the boat.

The salad bar portion of Moderno was marginally upscaled compared to Garden Cafe. They had manchego cheese, which I like, and the charcuterie was decent. It felt sort of like something I might have thrown together for some friends that I wanted to impress but like… Not too much? Basically what I’m trying to say is that it was okay, but left to my own devices I might spend my dining credits elsewhere.

Overall Impressions

Generally, I liked pretty much all of the food I had on the NCL Jewel. I don’t think any of it was “bad,” although much of it was “okay.” That doesn’t really surprise me, and I think there are other cruise lines that lean harder into the food as a draw. I appreciated that for the most part Norwegian doesn’t require specific dress codes or assigned seating, something I’ve heard other cruise lines still do. I’d cruise the NCL Jewel again without hesitation.

Mermaids Those Drawn With a Very Fine Camel's Hair Brush
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I’m doing what any reasonable person who has not eaten food for the last 48 hours would do and watching nothing but cooking videos.

Suckling Pigs
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Whether I live here for six months or six years, I’ve decided that I am not holding my house in escrow for the future owners. There are plenty of milquetoast plain white interior designs on the market, if they really care they’ll buy one of those. My walls shall have opinions.

Et Cetera
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My ideal April 1st is one where at no point do I see anything related to “April Fools.”

I realize this makes me sound like a buzzkill No-Funsington-Bear. I promise I’m not usually. What I am is exhausted of tricks, pranks, and other japery in poor spirit, poor execution, and poor intention.

We already live in a world where it’s rational to trust very little of what gets posted to the Internet. It’s time to put this “holiday” out of its misery, do us all a favor, and let it diminish and go into the West.

Et Cetera
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The important thing is that dreamers are still out there trying to build something new. There’s nothing the tech giants could think up this fiscal biennium that will excite me half as much as whatever’s going on over on Neocities this week.

Et Cetera
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Since I can never seem to pronounce “arnold palmer” correctly when I go to order one, I’m going to start calling it a Ryan Reynolds instead.

Relative confusion about what I’m asking for remains constant, but I get to rep a better brand.

Stray Dogs
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Language is hard. Communication is harder. When someone receives a communication, they interpret it through their own understanding and world view and the message that’s ultimately received may bear only a passing resemblance to the one that was intended. Ideally, we’re all working to get better at communicating what we actually intend, since the burden is on the communicator to be understood, not the receiver to interpret.

With this in mind, I’m writing this as something of a preemptive “disambiguation” of some terms I intend to use in future blog posts with two intentions in mind:

  1. I want to be clear with myself what these words mean and how I should use them, so that hopefully I do not make the mistake of using them in the wrong way such that other people are less likely to understand me.

  2. I want to be clear with everyone else how I am intending to use these words, for the same reason as above.

In the end my goal is to “think in public” about the world in a way that helps me understand it better. With any luck, that might also help some other people understand it better, or at least understand me better.

Defining “Ground Truth”

When I use the term “ground truth” I am referring to to what other people might call “objective reality.” These are the things we, as a society, “know.” Usually through direct observation, measurement, and empirical evidence.

The earth is round. This is ground truth. Some people “believe” otherwise. Beliefs are derived from ground truth, but they do not influence ground truth. Our ability to understand ground truth is imperfect, and we may be wrong about some parts of it, but the preponderance of credible sources currently agree.

Often, but not always, it is possible for you to demonstrate ground truth through your own observation or empirical measurement. Eratosthenes of Cyrene demonstrated the earth was round in 240 B.C. using shadows, an experiment you can run yourself with an afternoon’s lazy drive in the car.

Defining “Belief”

When I use the term “belief” I am referring to the entire host of things which a person might hold to be either true or false, but which cannot be empirically proven. These are the things you might “know” which are not ground truth.

Beliefs are often based on our understanding of ground truth, but sometimes they’re not. There are things people believe to their core that have no basis in our shared objective reality. Where people (myself included) get themselves into trouble is conflating the things we happen to believe with truth. I absolutely believe all of the things that I believe happen to be true. I also acknowledge the statistical likelihood of that is approximately zero.

The closer you can get your beliefs to ground truth, the more valuable your insights become. To yourself and to others. I only know of one way to do this, which is to take a cherished belief and really investigate it. Tear it down to its core and figure out why you believe it. Where did you learn the subset of things that made you believe that particular thing? Do they still hold up relative to the other things you know or believe? Beware of cognitive dissonance.

Defining “Principles”

When I say “my principles” what I really mean are the rules by which I live my life. They are not fundamental ground truth, although in many cases my intention is that they are reflective of it. They’re decisions I’ve made about what’s important, turned into systems.

Principles are like an operating system. They’re decisions made in advance about what’s important, what matters, and how to respond to various stimuli.

Being vegetarian or vegan is a principle. It comes from a person’s understanding of ground truth, their beliefs, and is ultimately codified in the pre-made decision about what they will or won’t eat.

Other Terms

I’m avoiding defining a few things: ideas, values. Probably others. I think for purposes of the kinds of things I’m intending to talk about what constitutes an idea won’t matter, and values are just a specific subspecies of beliefs. There are some academic senses where the distinction matters, but I don’t think it will here.

This should be enough of a shared lexicon to get where I’m trying to go, or at least to be able to define new terms along the way as necessary.

Those That Resemble Flies From a Distance