MSC Splendida Dining, Decoded

Your included dining is solid and better-corroborated than most of her sisters'. Two main dining rooms, La Reggia and Villa Verde, cover the standard tier, and Bora Bora & Pago Pago handles the buffet — Bora Bora runs 24 hours with an attached pizzeria, a real edge you can lean on at 2am after a late excursion day. Add La Piazzetta for coffee and pastries and a fleet-normalized Room Service policy, and the included tier alone gives you a full week's worth of solid meals.

The specialty roster is small but sharp: just two rooms, but each one earns its place. Butcher's Cut is the one specialty concept every Fantasia-class ship carries, a Linz heritage Angus steakhouse. Sea Pavilion is Splendida's own Asian-fusion room — sushi, sashimi, dim sum, hot pot, noodles — a broad multi-format menu that isn't branded Kaito the way some sister-ship Asian venues are.

If you're in the Yacht Club, you're looking at the best current suite-dining case in the class. The MSC Yacht Club Restaurant is the redesigned product — darker tones, softer textures, added vertical partitions for privacy, and a dedicated 24/7 culinary staff and sommelier — and The One Bar adds a second, poolside touchpoint for breakfast through snacks. No other Fantasia-class ship has both right now.

Specialty Dining sits at 6.8, the honest read of a two-room ecosystem — Butcher's Cut and Sea Pavilion are both strong on their own, but you're choosing between two concepts, not five. Quality Ceiling reads the whole program's best-case meal rather than any single venue's menu, and at 7.2 it's carried by the redesigned Yacht Club Restaurant sitting alongside Butcher's Cut and Sea Pavilion at the top of Splendida's roster. Variety — exempt from the deduction because it measures program breadth, not food quality — lands at 7.3, helped by a roster that runs from a heritage-Angus steakhouse to hot pot and dim sum to a 24-hour buffet with its own pizzeria.

Casual & Quick Dining lands at 6.9, the highest of any Fantasia-class ship, because Splendida is the only one running four separate extra-cost casual stops: Sports Bar, Bar del Riccio's gelato counter, the Nutella Bar and HappyPuppy Stand, and L'Espresso Coffee Bar. That's real format breadth — a bowling-plus-food room, a dessert counter, a branded crepe stand, a coffee bar — not four ways of selling the same snack.

Value lands at 7.2, and it's grounded in structure. You get a completed Yacht Club refit with two suite touchpoints instead of one, a 24-hour buffet with an attached pizzeria you can walk into at any hour, and a tier-based room service fee schedule that's complimentary for Fantastica, Aurea and Yacht Club guests. Those are the facts doing the work here — not a missing specialty price sheet.

Five of Splendida's 13 venues are included and open to everyone onboard. La Reggia and Villa Verde, covered above, are the full-service tier. Below that sits Bora Bora & Pago Pago (7.1), Splendida's buffet — scored as one connected buffet zone, not two venues. Bora Bora is the larger of the pair and a confirmed 24-hour operation with an attached pizzeria, a real edge over the class's other buffets when you want food outside normal hours. Pago Pago is the smaller companion space alongside it.

La Piazzetta (6.5) is the included quick-service stop — a coffee shop with pastries and sandwiches, the class-standard piazza-space format you'll find a version of on every Fantasia-class ship under a different name.

Room Service (6.8) runs the same fleet-wide normalized policy as every other ship in this class: delivery is complimentary for Fantastica, Aurea and Yacht Club guests, with a fee for Bella; a late-night surcharge applies from 11pm to 6am for all tiers; and American hot breakfast items carry their own surcharge. No ship-specific divergence has been confirmed for Splendida.

Sports Bar (6.6) pairs burgers, wings and snacks with two mini-bowling alleys — a real activity-plus-food format, scored independently from the same-named venues on Fantasia and Divina rather than assumed identical.

Bar del Riccio (6.5) is a dedicated gelato counter on Deck 14. Nutella Bar and HappyPuppy Stand (6.4) serves crepes and frozen drinks under the Nutella brand partnership — a distinctly branded dessert format, not a generic sweets counter. L'Espresso Coffee Bar (6.2) rounds out the tier, a standard dedicated coffee bar also on Deck 14.

None of these four is individually a showpiece — together, they're a real reason to expect more variety between meals on Splendida than on a sister ship with one or two casual stops.