O Roberto — Restaurant in Ponta Delgada

Chose the restuarant based on the fact it had a 4.1 star rating. How wrong that rating is!!!

On being presented with an impressive menu covered in leather, we decided to have Melon and smoked Ham as a starter, only to be told there was none. As a second choice I asked for the Bread, Pate and olive paste, again we were told they had none. The waiter then recommended the bread and cheese as the starter,so we went with that.

The bread was good (they we all know the Portuguese make great bread), but the cheese was a different story altogether. There it sat on a plate, white, and somewhat damp. I tasted a bit of the very soft cheese on the bread, or rather didn't taste it at all. It was totally tasteless mush.

For main course I ordered the "grill Mixed", hey who doesn't like a mixed grill right. My wife ordered the burger, but asked for no lettuce or tomatoe. We waited patiently for the food to arrive.

When the food arrived we got the suprises of our lives.

Firstly the burger, or "non-burger". There on the plate, hiding amongst copious amounts of chips (fries), sat something very hard to Identify. Now where I come from a simple burger is a meat patty in a bun, add other items as wanted. Not so in this "restaurant", not a bun in sight!!

Sitting on the top of this pile. Was an egg, so raw that when a fork was pushed into it, I could swear I heared the chicken squark in pain! Under the egg was a meat patty that was so dense, if I had thrown it at the cargo ship on the dock it would have put a hole in its hull and sunk it. Below that patty was some white tasteless goo. Probably the cheese from our starters that we didn't eat. At the bottom of the stack, was another of those rock like patties. Covering all of this was a supposed gravy that looked and tasted like dish water.

Now for that mixed grill...

All I can say is I didn't know that crematoriums provided meat to restaurants. The chicken, pork and steak were so overdone as to be basically tasteless. Copious amounts of mayonnaise was needed to make them edible.

At the end of our "meal", we were presented with the dessert menu. This looked just like the catalog that suppliers send to resturants for them to order from. It even included Spongebob square pants icecream.

If you are looking for good food at a reasonable price, then give this disaster a wide berth.

The highlight of the event was the look on the young American ladies face at the next table when she received...

We were here in July 2025 and ordered the tuna steak and the soup of the day. The soup was lukewarm and needed to be re-heated, and this was also the case with the fish and its side dishes: they were barely warm - not hot - but nevertheless the tuna fish was totally overcooked and therefore dry. Both the texture and the sauce reminded me of the kind of fish-in-sauce-in-a-tin that you can buy at Aldi shops. Also, the main dish was served within a few instants after finishing the soup. Service was kind but could not do much. Sorry, but we will not...

The most disappointing meal in my whole stay on the island! Half the menu wasn’t available (which we were only told after waiting to be served), the vegetables were pale and mostly from a can, the tuna steak was chewy, the house wine was poor quality, the service staff were clearly all having a bad day! A shame - there are some wonderful options in town at the same price (e.g I recommend Gastrónomo). But there are so many positive ratings and the restaurant was packed, so maybe I...