Tradicional Restaurant — Restaurant in Funchal

This started so well and quickly went south. We started off with a decent octopus salad and got a good wine recommendation. Everything was promising. We felt confident enough to order the clams. We placed our main orders for skewers, the fish of the day (sea bream), and the waiter explained extensively what sides we could expect with those. We were excited!

Lo and behold, when our mains arrived, NOTHING that we had ordered showed up??

No clams! When we asked the waiter about them, her response is “I no listen about the clams”…. Pardon me? But I saw you write down that order?

No skewers! When we asked the waiter why not: there was no apology, but an explanation that the Portuguese steak I got instead was “the same meat”…. Ok… but…. Anyway…

No sea bream! When we asked the waiter about this, she replied that it’s “golden fish with silver skin”…. So… this was the equivalent?why didn’t you just tell us there was no sea bream in the first place? We could have ordered something else!

I can understand running out of menu items or simply not having them, but i was shocked that they wouldn’t just inform us of that upfront (or come back to us after the order to update us what they wouldn’t be able to fulfill anything).

This was just poor form, for a restaurant, and something I have never experienced before. Very disorienting and disappointing.

To add insult to injury, one of the waitresses came to ask after the meal whether the steak was good and met my expectations?…ma’am… what expectations? I didn’t order the steak!

And we ended up paying full price for this mishap. No attempts were made at any concessions at all!

I highly...

Phenomenal value, delicious food, excellent (friendly and funny!) service, and a lovely atmosphere in an intimate venue. You will not regret the visit!

The chalkboard is the menu, 5-6 meat choices, 5-6 fish choices, and dishes arrive with chips, sweet potato, and mixed vegetables.

We arrived without booking, and were given a table, within 5 minutes of arriving the remaining 4 tables were fully taken; the staff were incredibly friendly and able to explain everything on the menu well, offering choice recommendations based on our conversation. I went with the 'rabbit Portuguese' and my partner ordered the T-bone steak (medium). Both arrived quickly and were quite frankly delicious. The food is not pretentious, and is incredibly authentic in its presentation, taste, and quality. It smells good, tastes good, and you feel good for choosing it! Having never had rabbit before, I have no frame of reference, but the dish was balanced incredibly well, with a wonderful texture (like a moist chicken breast), with the sauce being full of flavour without being overpowering, and not significantly gamey. No need for additional seasoning in the dish, and each bite had something new to offer in other meat, organs, or sauce components.

The steak was cooked very well and came in garlic butter, the meat was well cooked and didn't need a steak knife to cut through it.

The chocolate cake to finish was a nice touch, a dark chocolate cake with very sweet vanilla ice cream to balance it out.

Highly recommend a visit, and then another one to try something else on the menu. If you can reserve a table for peak times, you...

This place doesn’t deserve its rating at all. We had two starters (shrimps and scallops) and two mains (octopus and risotto with squids and shrimps). So starting from the best - the scallops were baked with cream and cheese which is unusual but tasted fine - thus the one star. The chef’s shrimps were tasteless although soaked in tomato sauce tasted as if they were just unfrozen and tossed in the sauce (first wasted 18€). The mains however were a complete disaster - risotto was overcooked and the shrimps and squids again tasteless topped with chef’s hair (when I mentioned this to the waiter, she just smiled and left - really?). The octopus wouldn’t be bad if it wasn’t swimming in a sweet mix of oil and balsamic and complemented with randomly mixed vegetables including sweet potatoes, paprikas, onion, other potatoes and with additional side salad (priceless experience but priced at 24€). The service was very excited in watching football game instead of taking care of the customers and then added extra 2.5€ to our bill for Balao - whatever that was. For this great experience a charge of 109€ (we had water, sangria and small beer to be fair), is just tremendous…. There are much better restaurants in the area, so unless you want to give it a shot as we might have just been unlucky, go and try...