Early dinning

[Mike H]

Cruise on the Mardi Gras coming up. I’ve seen post saying if you have early dining you can not eat in other restaurants until after 7:45.  Is this true?

[DeanneB]

I think this is only for specialty restaurants that requires a reservation.  It would look like there is a conflict if you book for the main and specialty restaurants.  Did you try to change to Your time Dining?  I think you can reserve at Specialty restaurants for YTD.

[RoadTravelled]

22 hours ago, Mike H said:

Cruise on the Mardi Gras coming up. I’ve seen post saying if you have early dining you can not eat in other restaurants until after 7:45.  Is this true?

We will be on the Carnival Celebration's maiden voyage next week (the sister ship to Mardi Gras).  We have Early Dining assigned (6:00pm) and we had no problem reserving the 555 Fahrenheit Steak House  and Rudi's Sea Grill at 6:00pm and 5:30pm respectively.  I think what you might be hearing is the process they use as over-flow for YTD.  As you may see on the deck plans, the ships only have one large MDR instead of the typical two.  There is a smaller dining room on the port side used for YTD but it is not big enough if everyone shows up (considering there are 5,000 people on board).

So, as I understand it, they use Chibang Restaurant and Cucino de Capitano as the reserve overflow.  So, I think there is a "hold" on these venues until after a certain time to insure they can accommodate everyone.  Then those 2 venues are released for the night.  My totally educated guess is that they did this because I see in so many of my cruises the MDR's half-full most nights.  So, it's a lot of wasted, valuable real-estate not getting maximum use.  It seems they are trying a different approach on these ships that probably is still be tweaked.  I'll know more I guess once on board and observe first-hand.

Make sense?  Hope that helps.