Disappointing Icon

Since the Quantum doesn't have a main dining room like every other cruise we've been on, they open up one of the restaurants, American Icon Grill, as the breakfast and lunch "restaurant" option. On other cruises, we would eat lunch in the main dining room every day, so we had some concerns here as the breakfast and lunch menus would not change for the entire cruise, but we went in with open minds.

As you know from our day 2 breakfast post, we were still trying to recover from our pre-vacation exhaustion so we didn't get up early enough to go to American Icon for breakfast. Instead, we opted to visit for lunch as we figured a calm and relaxed lunch would help us with our recovery. The lunch menu, with 5 appetizers and 8 entrees, also sounded pretty good, and had some options not on the regular American Icon dinner menu, which were the things we wanted to focus on. We were excited to try their take on the sandwiches especially. 

The first thing to arrive at our lunch table was a bread basket. We weren't expecting that, so it was a nice surprise. There were 2 types of bread - corn bread and what looked like a triangular shaped dinner roll topped with cheese. M immediately went for the cheese-topped bread as she would at any other restaurant, but sadly found the roll not very flavorful. She liked the texture, which was like a soft dinner roll, but it didn't have any of the cheesy flavor she was hoping for.

A opted to try both bread options so that he would know which to eat in the future. He agreed with M's assessment of the roll being very soft but not cheesy at all. The bread came with what was described as a honey butter, but there was no honey flavor to speak of. The corn muffins were okay, but A makes his own corn muffins at home, and they're, in our opinion, much better than these.

We ordered 2 appetizers to split. For his appetizer choice, A got the Reuben turnover (spelled "Rueben" on menu), which was puff pastry stuffed with pastrami and sauerkraut, and served with a Thousand Island dressing.

This was one of the items that we were both really interested in trying when we first read the menu online, as A especially loves Reuben sandwiches. Overall we thought that this was a pretty good appetizer, but A was a touch disappointed as the corned beef (it didn't taste like pastrami) didn't have as much flavor as he was expecting. The Thousand Island dressing blob under the turnover seemed a bit heavy-handed, but if you wiped enough of it off it wasn't overpowering. In the end, this was a little heavier than we thought it would be, but the flavors were mostly on target.

M chose the roasted beets and goat cheese salad with Michigan cherry preserves, arugula, roasted red pepper, and toasted walnuts. She had been expecting chopped up pieces of beets, but this was so much better. The sliced beets were light and refreshing, and were a great match for the creamy goat cheese. Compared to the turnover, this salad felt and tasted so healthy. All the flavors were balanced, and each component worked well. This was one of the best dishes we had had on the ship up to that point, and we would definitely eat that again.

After our appetizers, we waited quite a bit for our entrees to arrive. We knew the food was taking a while and the servers had mysteriously disappeared, but it wasn't so bad since we were chatting with the couple at the table next to us about the cruise (and about life). It's nice meeting new people on cruises, and these were some wonderful people that we would randomly run into every single day after that. 4,000 people on board and we managed to see them every day without any planning whatsoever. Small world.

Anyway, back to the service. At some point, their entrees arrived (even though we had ordered first) but ours were still MIA. The servers came over with some clam chowders and were very confused when we said we didn't order soup. We had no idea what was going on in the kitchen, but it was an extremely long wait and when the food actually showed up, it wasn't even ours. They took the soup back, but then there was another long wait before the entrees finally arrived. Sadly, they were not worth the wait. Maybe we should have taken the chowder.

For our main courses, we tried to focus on the dishes that were unique to the American Icon lunch menu. A lot of the menu overlapped with the dinner choices, but we wanted to try some of the few that didn't. M ordered the Alabama smoked chicken sandwich on a brioche bun with horseradish mayonnaise and dill pickles, which came with a side of fries. She had been picturing a pulled chicken sandwich, full of smoky and barbecue flavor, with some spicy mayo and fresh vegetables. That's not exactly what arrived.

The chicken tasted like a plain poached chicken. There was nothing smoked about it. We didn't get one hint of smoked flavor at all. Not what we were expecting or hoping for, but not fatal to a sandwich if you can get flavor from other components. The mayo was overwhelming. In M's notes from lunch, the first thing she wrote was, "Basically a mayo sandwich with a side of chicken." Eventually, M had to take the sandwich components off the bread and wipe off the excess mayo before she could eat any more of it. Way too much mayo, and on top of the quantity, it tasted like plain, regular mayo, not horseradish mayonnaise. We have a container of wasabi mayo in the fridge. Horseradish mayo can pack a punch. This was nothing like that, no heat, no zing whatsoever. The pickles and tomato were welcome to try to break up some of the boring mayo and chicken, but the sandwich overall was really not very good. We decided we were never getting this again.

A ordered the shrimp po boy sandwich on toasted baguette with creole mustard, which also came with fries.

The shrimp they used for this po boy were so small that they were lost in the fried breading. You couldn't taste anything but the oil and flavor of fried food. They also oddly chose to use mustard when most traditional po boys use mayonnaise. While we both like mustard, it added a vinegar-y note that didn't match up to the rest of the sandwich. The baguette was also really crusty and hard to bite through. A's sure that after eating this he had multiple small cuts in his mouth from the crust. This was really a disaster of a sandwich, and one we knew we would never order again.

After our very disappointing main courses, incredibly slow service, and 2 hours of sitting at our lunch table without moving (we were there so long that M's legs got fatigued and she had trouble walking at first after we stood up!), they brought over a dessert menu but we could not bear to be there any longer. The entire lunch just seemed to drag and after the horrible sandwiches, we really wanted to leave. We were full, but it wasn't that happy, satisfied, content fullness. If we could do it again, we would not be ordering those sandwiches.

Although we really hated those sandwiches, we did enjoy the appetizers. The Reuben turnover was a little heavy to eat every day, but it was tasty at least, and the beet and goat cheese salad was wonderful. Since those were good, we thought we would give American Icon another chance for lunch on a sea day later on in the trip. At the very least, we could both get beet salads and Reuben turnovers and be happy. Unfortunately (for reasons that will become clear later on), we never made it back for another lunch at that point in the trip, but we don't really regret missing it since other than beet salad, nothing was really that amazing.