The reservation-only Italian restaurant on the Virgin Voyage Resilient Lady, Extra Virgin serves up . Like all other restaurants on Virgin ships, the main dishes are all included as part of your base fare. I had made reservations for an early dinner on the 3rd night, and found the food and service to be excellent. For me, it was the best food served on the cruise.
Like the other dinner restaurants, people line-up outside before the doors are opened at 5:30 pm. We were seated in a small table for two, with other 2-person tables seated right next to us...so basically you are sitting in a table of six. Vikas was our server, and he was great throughout.
All the food was full-service restaurant quality, though it was clear some of it had been sitting around a bit before being served.
Appetizers:
Steamed Mussel - a decent amount of black mussels in non-creamy, non-tomato sauce that was great for bread dipping. It was excellent, though it had been sitting for a bit. I would get multiple servings of this.
Braised Mini meatballs - bar none, best meatballs I've ever had on a cruise boat. Would be great on a sandwich as a meatball sub. Really liked the marinara sauce, which is a great indicator the pasta dishes would be good, too.
Charcutterie board. We skipped this, but wanted to call it out since this dish was being prepared out in the open by a chef as we walked in. The dinner restaurants on Virgin often tries to make the meal into a little, and this was no different.
Pasta: -- all made fresh in-house.
Spaghetti alle vongole with little neck clams, beautiful to look at, and tasted great too. The spaghetti pasta wasn't the freshest. My preference is fresh linguine for these type of seafood dishes. Even then, this was a dish I would order again and again.
Oxtail Agnolotti - crazy good. The first bite of the entire agnolotti (like a ravioli) was one of the best bites I've had in my entire trip. And the texture was really good, with beef tendo crisps elevating the bite. They even had a fresh tangerine segment in the sauce.
From their Secondo section, I tried two things. The main was a grilled Mediterranean Sea Bass, and it was excellent: Half a sea bass portion (bone off, skin on). The sauce was good with the strong hint of lemon. The Yukon Gold potato had been oven roasted to create an incredible crunch...would have been amazing if served immediately, instead of it sitting a bit.
Braised Pork Cheek, never had this cut of pork before, so wanted to try it. It was OK...the meat was very gelatinous...maybe I wasn't in the mood for it this time.
They also have a dessert menu that they give after your main course. We were pretty full, so ended up skipping it.
It's a popular restaurant, and no other times were made available during the rest of our cruise. We did find out from the maître'd that if you come about 30 minutes before they close (21:00), they can fit you in for a late dinner. We were tempted, but never did end up going back. On my next Virgin cruise, will make sure this restaurant is the first on the list. read more