O Folclore — Restaurant in Loulé

Nice scenery over the Alte valley if you get the right table. Don’t let that fool you, nothing is authentic or typical in the food served, especially if you are a native like me. Unfortunately, we could even see waiters: picking from leftovers from food that had been served to customers and later collected from their tables, discussing clients behavior out loud (clients who were foreigners), and a customer reaching out to a waiter who told him “you need to ask my other colleague from that part of the restaurant”, instead of being of assistance to the customer. The food is OK at best, average portions, we ordered “pork stripes” and “pota with tomato rice” (“pota” is the cheapest type of octopus, squid, or cuttlefish we have in Portugal; it should not be served in restaurants). The rice was clearly made the day before or early in that day and microwaved (it was very dry, it’s not possible to have rice that dry without it having been to the microwave). The food needs and should be collected in local areas and the sea nearby to actually be able to properly serve customers.

We are Portuguese and tolerate flies around, but there was simply too many to the point we saw 2 customers asking to be moved to inside the restaurant. This is likely not the restaurant’s fault, but something that should be considered by anyone visiting and choosing to...

We stopped here for lunch. We asked for menus but server said no menus at lunch just 4 specials. Fish, pork chicken and Cataplana. We asked about the fish and enquired if filets no bones. Server said no bones. We waited 40 minutes for our food albeit the restaurant was busy. Table next to us who arrived 10 minutes after us their food came out. We asked why they got their food and we were still waiting. Server said oh they just ordered omelets. This was bothersome as we were specifically told only 4 choices available. Our food arrived and surprise we received 2 small whole fish lots of bones. Very difficult to eat. Problem seems to have been a lack of clear communication by our server. When asked why she had said no bones she denied telling us that but we all heard her. When the bill came we asked to split equally and pay by separate couples and were told and I quote "one Table, one payment"

Walking through town we went by a number of other restaurants all with menus and more variety.

Maybe just a bad day your experience...

We found this restaurant more or less by accident, since we were just wandering around in Alte looking for a place to eat. O folclore is situated next to a busy road leading into Alte, but in the evening there isn't much traffic, so we actually enjoyed sitting on the terrace next to the road.

We ordered the arro, de marisco, which was very good. The amount of food was so copious that we didn't succeed in finishing all of it. Of course the bottle of sparkling wine we ordered wasn't available, but our waitress brought us another one, that was also very nice. The price of the bill was very reasonable.

Funny coincidence: our waitress turned out to be from the Netherlands so we could...