O Pescador — Restaurant in Cascais

TOURIST TRAP

About the food : the grilled fish was good. But the dressing was a joke. Bits of batavia and carrots and tomatoes, some potatos. All this without a sauce until we asked and what came was vinegar and olive oil. I mean... Really ? The quality of the fish can not justify alone the price we paid. Either there was a lazy chef inside that night or they're just not interested in making an effort, all about making money.

About the service : The server was very coercive. Didn't give us the menu card before he urgently presented us with fresh fish, with no mention of pricing. Aggressively urged us to spend more by suggesting we order this or that, still without giving us the pricing. (He kept pushing us to order unnecessary things, such as an alternative couverts when we refused the first). Didn't even wait for the rest of the group to join us before he did this, as if he was going to send the orders to the kitchen asap but in the end he said he would wait for the others to come ?

When he did give a menu card it was ONE for a group of 16 and I had to ASK for more and even then, he only handed one more menu card.

TL:DR : we felt like we were being MILKED. Disgusting. Up until now we had had a spotless record of amazing restaurants for very reasonable prices. This tourist trap was the complete anti thesis to those : disappointing food and...

When we were seated the server took about 15-20 minutes to come find us. Normally in Portugal every restaurant gives you bread for free, this one you had to ask to have bread and you also had to pay for the bread. I asked for butter with the bread and I never received butter. We did not order much, we ordered 4 things. These took about 1 hour. We ordered 2 penne one squid and one tuna carapaccio. One of the people at my table ordered a plain pasta, only with butter. The server brought us a pasta with clams a red sauce and a mix of a lot of things. When we asked to redo it, the pasta came back with literally no butter. It basically didn’t have a taste. The penne wasn’t too good, the shrimp was good but the octopus was extremely chewy and it took me about 30 seconds to eat one piece of octopus. Then the squid. The squid was not seasoned. It did not have any salt, it was hard and it was cold. The tuna carpaccio was not good. It didn’t have a good taste and it had an extremely weird texture. Finally at the end, the service was horrible, the food was not good, the atmosphere was awful and overall it was a extremely...

It was a late lunch hour, the outdoors area which looked great, white linen, nice glasses and cutlery. There was only one other cover when we arrived as walk-ins and were sat at a nice table, we were brought wine, water and bread fairly promptly (we were in absolutely no hurry) and started to look at their extensive menu. I had a question when the waiter returned to take our order, the menu just said crab so I asked how they served the crab, Crab is Crab he said snootily, and shrugged his shoulders. It takes 35 minutes, it has to be picked out of the tank, killed and then cooked. I am seasoned at cooking crab, for a living at one time and on lucky occasions just out of the sea - the thoughts of a crab being cooked for 35 minutes - yikes !! This waiter made me feel like an idiot, looked down his nose at us, he he ever had charm he’s long grown out of it (we were straight from the beach like 90% of the people in Cascais) - angrily I told him we would paid for what we already had and left a €10 on the table as he greeted other diners & just left. This spoilt an otherwise lovely day and great holiday...