Historic Dining Project

[Lynda Bradford]

With the interest from visitors to QE2 Dubai to learn more about the history of QE2 we have news of a new project that will explore dining through the decades. 

With the success of “A Journey through time”, we have started to focus on the development of the next historical touch point, to be called “Historic Dining”, and will be located on “U” Deck as you walk from The Golden Lion to the Casino area.
 
Everything that we are trying to do is to preserve the History & Heritage of this iconic vessel, and indeed to showcase it so that for generations to come. It was with this in mind that we felt there was an opportunity to capture the dining experiences onboard through the ages. We plan to highlight these with a display of photographs of the Restaurants as they were at a particular time, and accompanied by the presentation of the original menus from the period, and we hope to augment the display by also presenting the crockery and cutlery from the era.
 
Now, we have a selection of Menus, and indeed some close friends of The QE2 are “loaning us” some Menus, but if anyone out there has some old and original menus stored in the attic, that they would like to give  / loan us, we would be eternally grateful. It’s quite a complicated project, but we hope this opened by the end of September 2023.
 

Contact admin@theqe2story.com if you can help

[cunardqueen]

A  simple but very complex but a fun project, Look at the soup, a bowl of chilled soup presented in Mauretania was very different to that served in the Grills, Then there was Kosher food with its own crockery, l remember the snowflake crockery on my first crossing, 37 years ago . I still marvel at seeing my table in 1986  beautifully laid up , and as your order was taken, what wasn't required was removed.  But then you also had silver service back then, now i can only imagine it's all pre-plated, and a blast in the combi to heat it through.

However were we not led to believe that anything bearing Cunard, including the vast array of crockery was destroyed? When you think of all that beautiful crockery...

Im sure if the owners spent 5 minutes with any of the old Maitre Ds, they could glean some amazing stories about Dinning on QE2

[Thomas Hypher]

However were we not led to believe that anything bearing Cunard, including the vast array of crockery was destroyed? When you think of all that beautiful crockery...

Dubai rediscovered a lot of the old crockery still onboard in the very early years of the current hotel operation and decided to reuse it. They even found a large supply of the Cunard branded wooden drinks mixers they are still using too. Not to mention old carpet supplies they've used outside what was the Caronia Restaurant and on the stairways. The de-storing clearly (and thankfully) wasn't ever fully completed despite the skips we saw upon the ship's arrival in Dubai in November 2008 and the stripping out as part of the conversion to hotel that's still ongoing since around 2015/6.

With regards to anything bearing Cunard branding being destroyed/removed it was a very haphazard and inconsistent process so Cunard branding is still present onboard in various places including where one would've thought the branding would've disappeared the easiest.

[Rob Lightbody]

Dubai rediscovered a lot of the old crockery still onboard in the very early years of the current hotel operation and decided to reuse it. They even found a large supply of the Cunard branded wooden drinks mixers they are still using too. Not to mention old carpet supplies they've used outside what was the Caronia Restaurant and on the stairways. The de-storing clearly (and thankfully) wasn't ever fully completed despite the skips we saw upon the ship's arrival in Dubai in November 2008 and the stripping out as part of the conversion to hotel that's still ongoing since around 2015/6.

With regards to anything bearing Cunard branding being destroyed/removed it was a very haphazard and inconsistent process so Cunard branding is still present onboard in various places including where one would've thought the branding would've disappeared the easiest.

I was told they had a list of items they needed to destroy at the time...

I certainly came across piles of Cunard everything when on board in 2011, and despite being on my own for much of the time, no I didn't take any souvenirs!

I think Cunard would be wise to establish a more formal link to qe2 now