Restaurante Tradicional e Típico Quinta do Martelo - a Tasca, a Mercearia, a Taberna, o Botequim, a Casa de Pasto — Restaurant in Angra do Heroísmo

We ate here for lunch. We were lucky, we were the only ones there. While the food per se is good, some of the prices are exaggerated. The soup is 100% worth it, great taste and made with organic vegetables from their own garden. The alcatra was good but I agree with other comments, making it 19€ per person is a lot more expensive than the regular 10-15€ per person in all the other restaurants. Placing this dish on the higher price point at 15€ feels more deserving, considering that it’s cooked on a wood stove. Serving it just on its own with only bread on the side is a shame, some simple potatoes wouldn’t hurt. The meat on its own becomes quickly dry. We asked for two glasses of wine but the waiter quickly “forced” us to buy a whole bottle at 25,30€. Seeing other comments where they were billed over 6€ per glass, maybe it was a good choice, and local wine unfortunately isn’t that common nor cheap in regular grocery stores, so the price in itself can be acceptable. Still, a lot of times we felt very pressured to choose a specific item, like we didn’t even have a choice. While maybe the waiter asks out of politeness where you come from at the beginning of the meal, I feel like it’s more of a way to see what kind of money you have. Needless to say, we shouldn’t have mentioned we are Swiss, but thank goodness I speak Portuguese, which usually helps us seem less touristy. Still, my husband doesn’t and on my own it happens that I cave easily under the right amount of pressure. At the end of our meal, the waiter came with a plate with TripAdvisor QR codes on it, gave us a whole speech about it while barely keeping eye contact. First of all, asking for good reviews is a faux-pas in our opinion. Good service will get a good review if it’s deserved. You shouldn’t have to force it down clients’ throats. Second, we were advised to keep our minds to ourselves if our rating wasn’t 4-5 stars. And finally, asking for a tip is definitely a bad idea. We’re not in the US. In Europe good service will naturally be rewarded with a tip, but asking for one is just a big no-no. We told the waiter to round our bill up to 80€ and he still had a hard time doing that, even with us telling him exactly how much of a tip it was. We ended up being billed 80.10€. It’s not at all about the 0.10€, but it was a fitting end to the whole experience. Overall, the restaurant is cozy and well decorated, but it’s definitely a tourist trap 🪤 Waiters would be wiser not to play it the American way. European charm has to...

A bit perplexed to see good reviews of this place.

Dear owners please clean up your restaurant entrance, to regular hygiene standards regardless of how much you charge.

While entering in this establishment if there's a smell of mold and dusty it means nothing has changed at the time this review was published.

If that's the case I would say not worth it, go elsewhere far cleaner, Terceira has plenty of other good restaurants with traditional food.

Indeed the entrance still maintains the old shop look from the past, it's interesting to see and admirable to maintain as a museum but it's not clean and as said before it smells moldy and dusty.

It was late, we were hungry so we decided to risk, thinking that maybe the dining area and kitchen was distant from this section but unfortunately no.

Behind the old shop area apparently is the kitchen, a few tables and upstairs the main restaurant room, still with vintage decoration and furniture, some of it doesn't look properly clean either.

About the food, we didn't try the traditional alcatra here, we already had it in other restaurants.

The starters were good except for the butter.

The butter didn't come inside a factory sealed wrap like in any other restaurants on the island. I'm not sure if it was used by other clients before and there's no way to prove it but we decided not to take the risk.

The others dishes besides alcatra are regular steaks, fish, soups, etc.

We were told it was not possible to change the sides of steaks for example, so the claim that some of these plates are made fresh aren't true.

Before you say there could be a misunderstanding there wasn't.

How come it's not possible to change from fries to boiled potatoes or rice or salad, etc.?

Not being able to change or remove the sides of a steak is silly, it means the meal is precooked, nothing wrong with that but don't claim all food is fresh.

Nevertheless the steaks were ok but the price was higher than other restaurants that offer freshly cooked steaks at a lower price.

The appetite for having dessert was gone at this point.

The starters were the best except the butter as mentioned and we try not to think about the mold and dust in the entrance.

In short, this place seems to have a nice history, tries to preserve the tradition which is admirable and probably was good in the past but today it's not a proper place to have a meal.

Maybe to go for a bottled...

Extremely overrated.

This restaurant was sold to us, online, as "the best restaurant in Terceira". I can tell you from the get go: it's not. It's not the best, but it's also not the worst. It's exactly the same, food wise, as many others, but at a much higher price point (for no reason).

I'll start by the positives: the decoration is very nice, like an old house from many Portuguese families back in the day. Many old objects and interesting things that make it feel more like a museum than a restaurant. The Alcatra is good and the portion (of meat) is very generous.

That's about it. The Alcatra is good, but it tasted exactly the same way than the Alcatra we had in the two (much cheaper) restaurants we went to before. The taste is the exact same. Because, as they kept repeating to the point of exhaustion on this restaurant: it's traditional from Terceira. And, as such, every decent restaurant has it. With the same recipe. Exactly the same way. The difference is that in the other places it comes accompanied with french fries and sweet bread, while here it's only sweet bread (and they only give you two slices, take away the rest and ask you to "ask for more if you want").

The waiter isn't rude, per se, but he is very profit oriented: he tells you his suggestions, which is the full menu, and if you don't want any of the things, he acts as if you made a poor choice, insisting, almost, in a rather uncomfortable way, to get the things that he wants you to get. Even after refusing, he still brought us things that we didn't ask for.

Beverages wise, they are extremely lacking in everything that is not alcoholic.

The desserts are... okay, I guess. Nothing to write home about at all.

At the end, with a bill much larger than in any other place so far (for absolutely no reason and without feeling like it was worth it at all), the waiter still had the nerve to ask if we wanted to give a tip and acted a little taken aback when he got a "no" as the answer. Asking for a tip, in Portugal, like that, is extremely rude. People leave tips when they feel like they should or that the restaurant deserves it. To be placed "on the spot" like that left an extremely bad taste in my mouth, that only further soured the entire experience.

Go if you have money to spend and don't care how you spend it. Otherwise, go somewhere else: you will eat the same for a much cheaper price (and less of a...