Mama Shelter Lisboa — Hotel in Lisbon

We booked the hotel for our honeymoon - and the location was perfect. It felt far enough that it wasn’t in the middle of everything but close enough that getting to the center of the city was no problem.

The front desk staff were wonderful and kind - and make the whole process easy and quick; had our room ready in minutes. The room itself was small, but we knew that going in and the room itself was nice. Our thermostat seemed to not work and would sometimes blow cold air and most times not. We opened the window for a breeze - which is fine, but wasn’t expecting to do that. Also, the fridge that was in our room didn’t seem to work properly - the light on the inside flickered and was warm.

I think our main problems arose when we dined at the hotel restaurant. We went twice - once on a Saturday and on a Monday. On Saturday, it was extremely busy, which is expected. We had amazing service and felt attended to! Everything was great and we had a wonderful time.

Monday, on the other hand: we ordered our appetizers , food, and drinks. It was not busy at all to say the least. Our appetizers we waited on for an hour - and that’s because we finally got our waiter to come back and ask about our appetizers , which they simply said “oh, I forgot.” and started to walk away. We had ordered two appetizers, and stopped them again to ask for at least one still, and they did provide us that.

We had planned to have dessert, since the hotel provided a free drink or dessert coupon - but we waited another 45 minutes after we had finished our dinner, and had to ask another waiter who wasn’t in our area for the check. There was also some confusion with the coupon as well: when we had asked about the free drink, which is a “a drink of the day” we were told it was a particular drink which we decided to pass on and save for the dessert. But, when the table next to us asked about the drink of the day, the same waiter said a completely different drink (and one we would’ve actually preferred).

That whole experience, along with some the hotel issues really soured our experience with Mama Shelter. It’s a really trendy and pretty hotel - and we spent a lot of money for our stay, but I would not recommend staying or dining there...

Went there for lunch on a work assignment. They advertise on the Mama Shelter website a "daily lunch menu" M-F. Our reservation was for 1:30pm (lunch in Portugal starts at 1pm). When we arrived, we were told that the daily menu wasn't available. We naturally asked why (since no details were given) and we were told that they have a limited amount of daily menu dishes and when they run out, they're done for the day. (By the way, that's not mentioned anywhere on their website or on the in-house menu.)

The server realized our discontent (and probably overheard us contemplating going somewhere else) when she decided to offer us a "solution". She suggested that we order a starter (that she selected) and one of their salads as a substitute to the “daily menu”. The price would be the same. (The ‘’price” was the least of my worries as I was there for work.)

So we decided to stay. The starter was a beet salad (no cheese) with a light balsamic vinaigrette dressing and the main was a Caesar Salad with chicken. I thought it was odd to have two salads, but decided to go with.

The meal also came with a glass of house wine. (Water was an extra 3,5€.)

So, here’s the deal:

The beet salad was simple, but lovely. Not overwhelming and a nice choice for a starter The Caesar salad was well presented, but swimming in a thick and heavy dressing (that I should have asked for on the side). The chicken was lightly breaded and had no flavour at all (you’ll definitely need salt and pepper).

The house white wine was disappointing at best. Very sad in such a wine-rich country like Portugal.

Bottom line: I probably will not return (or recommend) this place for lunch.

I will give it one more shot for dinner as I’ve heard that the dinner menu is better.

If the dinner experience is on par (or god forbid worse) than today’s, I’ll come (or send clients) here for drinks only at the bar or rooftop.

The positive side: the ambiance is nice and I’m happy to see that Lisbon’s getting more hip places like this one. (It would be even better if the level of detail of the food and wine matched the cool design...

If you want a tiny room that smells like vomit, has construction noise, and a line for the elevator to get to your room, then this hotel is for you!

We stayed at Mama Shelter for a few nights. It looked cool and quirky, but it was just gross and inconvenient. The room was small, which is fine, but it wasn’t set up well…no shelves, few hooks, etc that make it convenient to store your stuff. The carpet had a lot of mystery stains. I kept getting whiffs of a vomit smell, which I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from until the last night. I figured out what one of the mystery stains was…it was vomit and the carpet clearly wasn’t cleaned properly. How disgusting! If I would have realized that before, we would have changed rooms.

There were only 2 elevators for the hotel that were used for guest rooms and the very popular rooftop bar, so you had to wait in line with people going to the rooftop to get to your room. It was super annoying when we were tired and ready to just get to our room.

The service was not great either. We asked for some extra pillows when we left in the morning, which the front desk staff said that they would bring up. When we came back in the afternoon, no pillows…so we had to walk downstairs to ask them again (since our phone didn’t work). We asked the housekeeping staff for some new towels when she came to clean the room, but she didn’t have any for some reason. Then, we had to go downstairs to ask for those too.

Lastly, there was construction noise outside our window at 3 am one night. The next morning it started at 8 am. That’s not the hotel’s fault, but it definitely made for a horrible nights sleep.

While the hotel stay was awful, we would recommend the restaurant and rooftop bar. They were...