This major cruise line is now serving breakfast for dinner — in a fancy dining room

13.03.2024 - 14:57 / thepointsguy.com

Apparently, I'm not the only cruiser who doesn't always have the stamina for the drawn-out ship dinners in main dining rooms.

That, or Princess Cruises has just made a colossal mistake with its newest vessel.

As I'm seeing this week during an early look at the still-not-quite-finished Sun Princess, the line has reserved the top level of the ship's elegant three-deck-high main dining room for passengers looking for a quicker sit-down meal than is typical in a main dining room.

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It's also changed up the menu for just this one level, offering a set and simple lineup of the sort of comfort food items you find in a diner: a bacon cheeseburger, fish and chips, chicken wings and fried chicken, to name a few.

Renamed Americana by the line, this top floor of the main dining room also offers a solid array of dinerlike breakfast dishes, including made-to-order omelets, a breakfast burrito and a "diner's hash" made with salt beef or halloumi served with home-style potatoes, fried eggs, roasted bell peppers and griddled onions.

All of the dishes, including the breakfast items, are available all day.

So, yeah, on Princess, you now can have breakfast for dinner — and in an elegant venue, to boot.

To which I say: Fabulous. Bravo, Princess. Who doesn't love breakfast for dinner? And who doesn't sometimes want a quicker dinner on a cruise ship that isn't just a trip to the ship's buffet?

As I am learning this week, dining at Americana is a much more relaxing alternative to dining at the buffet on Sun Princess — whether it's at breakfast time, lunchtime or dinnertime.

It's early days still for Sun Princess, but the ship's buffet, called The Eatery, has been a madhouse with crowded corridors, slow served-by-staff buffet lines and too few seats — a recipe for frustration. Hopefully, it'll improve as the currently Mediterranean-based ship sails in warmer climates and more passengers move to outside venues and seating areas for meals.

Note that if you want a traditional main dining room dinner, you'll find that on the two lower levels of the main dining room. The middle level (called Horizons) offers come-anytime-you-want dining with the normal drawn-out service. The lower level (also called Horizons) offers the more traditional fixed-seating dinner format that once was de rigueur at Princess.

Both of those levels offer a classic main dining room menu with such dishes as Norwegian salmon with creamy mashed potatoes, carrots and lemon-caper butter, and grilled New York strip steak with garlic-herb butter and vegetables.

Related: First look: Sun Princess, the giant new ship from Princess Cruises

In my one visit to Americana so far, I found the