Zenith: Take two from Tampa

Cruising on the Zenith has highs and lows, with amenities, food and entertainment getting mixed reviews from this traveler.

By ROBERT N. JENKINS, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 16, 2001

Zenith

The Zenith, now sailing out of Tampa, is a sea-going sophisticate. Yet a weeklong cruise left me feeling that I had been at an unfulfilling cocktail party. Plenty to enjoy, but also disappointments.

The upscale tangibles are in place and much of what happens aboard the ship is well done:

Lounge and lobby walls bear prints by David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, even a giant photo of one of William Wegman's Weimaraners.

[Times photos: Robert N. Jenkins] Passengers have a casual lunch on deck as the Zenith is anchored at George Town, Grand Cayman.

Stairwells are faced in floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Unusual, even sparse, flower arrangements and planters of caladiums and miniature palms are freshened by the onboard florist.

Celebrity Cruises created on each of its eight ships a room for cigar smokers. On the Zenith, Michael's Club proffers top-shelf liquors, numerous ports and cognacs and, of course, 18 types of stogies.

Visitors sink back into padded chairs upholstered in different shades of deep red, or they plop down on two off-white leather couches that flank a mock fire, flickering continuously in its mock fireplace.

One deck down, the intimate Martini Bar seats just 26, on fabrics in a windowpane plaid of butterscotch and blue. Those colors complement the back-lit wall of stained glass behind the bar. The menu offers caviar and a seemingly endless variety of martinis made with nine kinds of vodka, six gins, two rums.

For the designer-caffeine crowd, the Cova Cafe has 13 coffees and teas, plus six liquor-laced coffee drinks. The menu here also has a choice of caviars, to partner with champagnes. The room is named for a Milan confectioner, so there are various sweets on the menu, and two display cases are filled with gift boxes of Cova chocolates.

An unusual light sculpture marks the intimate Martini Bar.

Where Cova is all blond wood, wicker chairs and large-square lattice for a back wall, the 216-seat Rainbow Room lounge is nightclub dark. Beneath a low, copper-colored metal ceiling, banquettes are covered in a nubby patchwork of earth tones.

Brass-accented railings in art deco define three levels of seating that face the bandstand and dance floor. The room is rectangular yet seems to be fashioned without a hard angle, only softly sweeping curves.

Downsized

Yet the feeling onboard the 91/2-year-old Zenith is that less is not necessarily more.

The vessel was refurbished in 1999, when some competitors were introducing ships that could carry nearly three times Zenith's 1,354 passengers. In line with its restrained decor, this ship has no glitzy, multideck atrium sporting changing colors of neon tubing and glass-walled elevators. There is no grand staircase -- or pair of them -- leading to and from a lobby featuring a piano bar/cocktail area or waterfall sculpture.

The smallish stage in the Celebrity Show Room does not revolve or have elevated platforms. With just one balcony level, this theater cannot match the three-deck-high seating areas becoming common at sea.

The daily agenda of organized activities is minimal; reflecting that, there is a blessed lack of public address announcements piped into the cabins.

There are 146 gambling machines in the Zenith casino, just six tables for blackjack and poker, one roulette wheel, one craps table. Actually, what's more noteworthy is what is outside:

Two huge leather couches sit along the casino's glass wall, amid planters of ferns and palms. The couches face large windows on the sea and eight cases displaying replicas of ancient Greek art.

Models of ancient Grecian art work fill cases across the corridor from the Zenith’s casino.

But there can also be too little of a good thing, as is the case with the corridors on either side of the popular Rendez-Vous lounge. This passageway is the only way to reach the front doors of the ship's dining room.

These walkways are just adequate for the heavy flow to and from the dining room during the two seatings at both lunch and dinner. When artwork, to be auctioned later, are displayed on easels placed in the paths, bottlenecks are frequent and irritating.

Similarly, while there is plenty of open space on five decks for tanning, reading, walking and dozing, the two swimming pools are backyard small and smaller.

For the sun worshippers, there are about 300 thickly padded chaises, hundreds more without padded covers, and eight two-person cabana chairs with foot rests -- which are, in a word, cute.

There are three whirlpools on deck but the only sports facilities are two Ping-Pong tables, two dartboards, shuffleboard courts and a shallow golfball-driving net. The exercise room has about 20 treadmills, stair-steppers and stationary exercise machines, but 20 people at once would overwhelm this room.

There are free saunas, but the various services in the spa are pricey; massages run from $99 to $220, facials from $99 to $117, and one package of rub, wrap, facial and massage runs $356.

Again differentiating it from the larger, newer cruise ships, Zenith lacks the increasingly popular Internet cafe. But it does have a well-used card room with 11 tables. From the looks of it, mah-jongg is back in vogue.

Mah-jongg aboard a "sophisticated" ship? Everything old is new again.

Waiters set the tables for lunch in the 876-seat formal dining room aboard the Zenith.

If you go

Celebrity Cruises' Zenith, a German-built ship launched in April 1992, has 667 cabins and 22 suites on five decks.

The Zenith carries eight of these two-person minicabanas, for those who want either some privacy or shade while out on deck.

All of the officers are Greek, reflecting the nationality of the originating cruise company, Chandris. The dining room and cabin steward staff come from dozens of nations -- including such Central European countries as Romania, Lithuania, Hungary, Macedonia and Croatia. This mirrors an onboard-employment trend of the past decade. While all crew members who interact with passengers speak English, immediately understood conversations are not universal.

EATING ABOARD: Most shipboard food barely matches that of a decent restaurant on land. Some of this can be attributed to having to serve, even on this relatively small ship, more than 800 diners who are instructed to show up in the Caravelle Dining Room within a 15-minute period before the doors are closed.

To counter this reputation, upscale Celebrity hired as its executive chef Michel Roux of France. (The cigar-smoker's room, Michael's Club, is named after him.)

Roux's menus promise much. For instance, the dinner entrees one night were broiled, marinated fillet of Pacific drum fish, pasta with thinly sliced, baked pork loin, roast quails, rack of roasted lamb brushed with Dijon mustard and New York sirloin steak. There were also four appetizers, three soups and two salads.

The presentation of the dishes was attractive, but the galley delivered only modestly on Roux's offerings.

Among the seven of us at my table, there were complaints during the week about the pasta dishes (twice), the lobster and the lamb. There was praise for the filet mignon, veal cordon bleu and a seafood dish. The unchallenged winner nightly was the dessert chef.

While Zenith has but one formal dining room, the pool deck cafeteria, the Windsurf Cafe, offered a highly popular, no-surprises breakfast buffet and a remarkably broad lunch selection.

In addition to the usual salad bar options, one day the hot lunch foods were pork in mango sauce, jerk beef, broiled mahi mahi, rock fish chowder, grilled eggplant with cheese, chili made with squash, cooked vegetables, and roast beef and corned beef sliced to order.

The pasta station at this lunch was offering spaghetti with either clam or tomato sauce. For dessert there were eight baked items, pumpkin mousse, three cheeses and even gelatin with fruit.

Half an hour after this lunch service ended, the pizzeria opened.

Room service is available at no extra cost for all meals. Windsurf is also open some nights for dinner, but reservations must be made.

SLEEPING ABOARD: Cabins are said to be relatively roomy for the industry, averaging about 172 square feet. But that would have to include the closets and shower-only bathroom: My cabin, including the twin beds, desk and love seat, measured about 111/2 by 9 feet. There are no cabins with verandas.

While my cabin had good drawer space, the closets would be just adequate for two persons, considering the Zenith requests that passengers dress up for dinner on four nights of a seven-night cruise.

Each cabin also has a small safe, a hair dryer and a color TV that shows (weather permitting) CNN and ESPN, two shipboard instructional/documentary channels, and both free and pay movies.

A caution about the TV: Reception was so erratic as to be annoying, and the only ESPN channel received was the Latin American edition. Only once did I hear commentary in English, and the channel essentially provided all soccer, all the time. Granted, you didn't book a cruise to watch TV, but the reception and choice of programming were disappointing.

ENTERTAINMENT ABOARD: As with cruise-ship food, the musicians and other performers onboard are seldom memorable. The showroom's musical reviews invariably feature at least eight spirited dancers racing through dozens of songs and several costume changes, while the featured male and female vocalists strut about at the front of the stage.

Zenith had three of these revues, and I saw exactly one misstep by the dancers in more than two hours of strutting and twirling. But the unifying themes of the music were hardly creative, and the vocalists not worth searching the CD bins for back home.

Not so featured vocalist Michelle Murlin. She avoided dancing but strutted through impressions of three singers -- dead on with Liza Minelli doing her Cabaret number. Murlin worked the audience more than necessary: All she had to do was sing her solo from her appearances in the national touring company Cats: Memories.

However, Murlin leaves the ship when it docks today to spend several weeks at her home in Weston, near Fort Lauderdale. She expects to go back aboard in February. If you are considering booking aboard the Zenith, have your travel agent find out when Murlin returns -- she was easily the highlight of the seven nights' performances in the show room.

There are numerous musicians performing several times a day in five lounges. I enjoyed the five-piece band Axis, energetic young men from the Caribbean who were equally adept singing country music, reggae or golden oldies.

GOOD NIGHT: In addition to a small chocolate on the pillow each night, cabin stewards leave the next day's weather forecast tucked inside pretty little cards. The illustrations, a series of 14, were created by terminally ill children taking part in the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Celebrity and its parent company, Royal Caribbean International, sponsored creation of this series of cards and are providing cruises to some children and their families in the program.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: There are 12 cabin categories and two pricing periods for the Zenith through its stay in Tampa. But rates have been heavily discounted throughout the cruise industry since the events of Sept. 11. Several people told me they were sailing for just $399 -- a fare more typical of the downscale Carnival ships.

Contact a travel agent for more information or to make reservations, or go to the Web site www.celebritycruises.com.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright