Armazém do Sal - Michelin Guide 2024 — Restaurant in Funchal

Waited 1.5 hours for dessert. Whole meal took 3 hours (3 course meal). Unacceptable timing and uneventful food. Amouse was down right bad with tasteless lentil and chewy dry lamb cube very displeasing. Starter okay but very small and bread standard with underwhelming accompaniment. Main dish steak was very oversized (shocking after starter) and the potato puree was cold and salty. Two sauces of mustard dijon and truffle sauce both only tasted like a base of mayo without other flavor. The dessert though delicious lava cake was unoriginal and served inexplicably late. I was so annoyed that I tried to eat it fast to be able to get home before midnight from the restaurant and burned my mouth. I couldn’t enjoy it. Meanwhile the chocolate mousse alongside the cake was overhwlmong and dense. Furthermore, to compensate the restaurant served us a mere one scoop vanilla ice cream during the waiting time, the same ice cream that was then served as a part of the lava cake dessert as well. Horrible! Do not recommend if you want to spend a lot of money on edible food and waste your vacation time in this restaurant. Also, they kept on pouring us new and new bottles of water that we didn’t ask for and charged them all at the end. You would think such an expensive restaurant wouldn’t try and make money of water but they do. We even told them we don’t want to have the final bottle of water but they laughed and poured anyways. The bathroom is also not to the caliber of the rest of the decor. Read a review while waiting of people leaving without paying for such a disappointing experience and were tempted to do the same, but figured we would be the bigger people and politely accept we made a mistake choosing this restaurant rather than to complain more and argue with staff. Really a horrid way to end the night after a wonderful day in madeira. Put a sour note on everything we did before. DO NOT GO HERE. Learn from...

Well.. it was disappointing, to say the least.. Start off with the good points, nice looking restaurant and a good atmosphere. The wine card is abundant, and the selected wine from the Douro region was great.

I picked the Gastronomic menu for my birthday, and my girlfriend had an a la carte menu. First of all, service was not good, but I have to say they tried their best. It felt like they had been taught a couple of lines to say without understanding what they were actually saying, making it feel very cold. As if they were trying to play Michelin restaurant without having a clue. The first course came after 30 minutes and had some preparations of mackerel, not the most sophisticated and very salty. It was not really a dish but more some snacks on a plate. The next course, after 45 minutes, was a piece of red snapper , again really salty but in flavour quite okay. Afterwards, some nikita with hard frozen pineapple while we waited for the main course, which would hopefully save the evening.. About an hour after the snapper, I got the "wagyu" beef skewer.. one tiny piece of beef with some sweet potato and a sauce.. the beef was chewy, and after two bites, I got frustrated gave up.

Never have I felt so fooled in a restaurant in my life. No way I was paying €85,- for these plates of food.. After explaining my frustrations, it took some time for the staff to understand how deeply disappointed I was and asked for the bill before ordering the desserts includes on the menus. They scrapped the menu I had and did come through with a birthday dessert and bubbles, which felt a bit as a comedy show. Nonetheless, it was the least they could have done to make the evening a bit lighter.

The food my girlfriend had from the a la carte was fine but definitely not worth the price. Looking back to the reviews of the last weeks, I deeply regret coming here.

Would not recommend until...

We went for dinner here based on the recommendation from Michelin app (I will be writing to them separately), I wish I'd consulted the Google reviews earlier as unfortunately the negative reviews are accurate.

From start to end this was quite a disaster.

Service: on entry we were initially ignored by several staff members before being seated. From then on it was farcical. Staff members genuinely appeared lost, staring into space most of the time. When food was brought over (at least 45mins wait between each course) they robotically read a memorised script. Throughout the meal the kitchen staff were coming in and out of the chest freezer hidden by the bar under a sheet which wasn't very elegant.

Other comments we heard from the tables around us included "dont bother bringing over the desert menu", "at least it's eadible" and "I'll drink the wine if I can"

Final nail in the coffin for service was when they tried to charge us an extra €30 for a set menu we hadn't had.

Food: quite average so not sure why it was recommended. Amuse bouche included garlic butter that didn't taste of garlic(?) and dried crab. Our starters were made to look pretty but ultimately lacked any flavour.

Mains were disappointing again, I ordered the crab and basil pasta but couldn't taste crab or basil and pasta was undercooked and too starchy. Other main we had was not as described (battered fish not shown on the menu) on top of risotto which was again undercooked and flavourless.

Wine: we didn't have the wine pairing and chose a bottle we'd had before so enjoyed, thank goodness! Several tables who had the pairing kept sending wine back due to the poor quality.

Overall my feeling is that someone has bought this restaurant in order to buy the Michelin recommendation and Google reviews and then hollowed it out and tried to cut every corner to...