STAY AWAY, TYPICAL TOURIST TRAP
Aquarium bred seafood, poorly cooked in all the dishes we ordered. Lobster mayo salad: more mayo than lobster. The shrimp in it are so over cooked that it’s just like chewing a rubber ball. “Bolhão pato” style clams: cooked ok, but not a lot of flavour. Drowning in sauce made with practically raw garlic, which is not what this is supposed to taste like. Seafood “cataplana” (like a mixed seafood stew): the worst dish of our lunch. Some of the shells were so overcooked that it was just like chewing on gum. The other shells were full of grit, it felt like eating mouthfuls of sand (and the manager says it’s not their fault!). The prawns were most likely frozen, so they put them in the bottom of the pan, which made them overcooked, dry and nasty in general. Lobster and crab were basically the same. They sauce in which they cook the seafood is so overpowering that you can’t taste seafood at all. This is usually a strategy bad restaurants use to hide the flavour of older seafood. Be aware. You can only taste the pepper in the sauce. To finish, this restaurant doesn’t serve neither coffee nor dessert. Service is lacking, with waiters trying to force the most expensive dishes on you and being slightly rude and obnoxious. They’ll treat you like your just another stupid tourist that fell in their trap. Maybe that’s exactly what it is? 🤷♀️
In summary: I do not recommend and I sure won’t be back ever again. Specially if you consider that variety of good seafood restaurants in...
Read moreA group of 7 of us ate at this restaurant based on the reviews here and we were somewhat disappointed. Sure, the seafood was fresh and service friendly. But prices were very high considering this is supposed to be a fishing village. And the environment was casual at best and not warranting such high prices. They also seemed to be very slow with some things. For instance, a soup one of us ordered took half an hour and multiple reminders. Another dish we ordered took 45 minutes, but they did not tell us it was going to take that long when we ordered.
They had the same English song playing the entire time we were in the restaurant and we just assumed they didn't realize the song was repeating. When we told them, we were shocked to hear that they actually knew and this was on purpose. I still can't believe the answer we got. One of the strangest things we've ever experienced at a restaurant.
Overall, I cannot recommend this place for the reasons explained. I'm really surprised to see the extremely high marks others have given this place and have to wonder whether some of these reviews are from friends...
Read moreCame here for a late lunch on a weekday during the tourist off-season. Food was amazing -- especially loved the garlic shrimp and the cataplana. Service was honestly pretty iffy -- I have little to no expectations for service, but we were pretty much neglected after our first server left towards the beginning of the meal. We ordered all of our dishes at the beginning (garlic shrimp, cataplana, and seafood rice), and after waiting about 1+ hours for the seafood rice to come and seeing customers who ordered after us receive theirs, they told us it'd be another 1/2 hour to an hour for the seafood rice to be prepared because nobody started it. There was only one other group seated so it wasn't busy, and the waiters were mostly chatting so we had to walk up to ask for basic things (like the check). Not sure if...
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