Santo Pizzaria & Steakhouse — Restaurant in Porto

Unfortunately, the food is simply not good enough. If you want good Italian food, go elsewhere.

Food:

We had the tomato soup (actually the best dish we had), Judas pizza (salami and chilli), and the burrata linguine with pesto.

I wanted the pizza to be good because I read the reviews which said the pizza was not good, but I hoped, wished, dreamed... and it was not good. Pizza is not difficult and it is cheap to make. Yet, at Santo they fail in two ways. Most disappointingly, the dough is too thin that the crust of the pizza broke into shards when holding it. This is not a case of 'thin crust' style; this is too thin that you can't eat the crust. See the photo attached: you should never have this left on your plate, no matter which style you make the pizza. Secondly, there just needs to be more tomato sauce on the pizza. I asked the waiter in advance to pass this on, since i saw many pizzas looking dry. However, unfortunately the chef did not manage to transfer this instruction onto the pizza.

More disappointing was the pesto linguine. Truly enough, there is a whole burrata on top of the pasta, which is nice. Ours had a slight tang (sour) taste, indicating it was not as fresh as it could be. Burrata very quickly becomes not 'most fresh' after a couple days, and while nothing terribly wrong with it, could have been more fresh. This isn't too bad, even if it could have been better. What was actually bad was the pesto. It had no flavour. Why? Because it was just oil, with very little basil. Pesto, again, is a great and simple recipe. This was so tasteless with all the oil in Italy. Clearly, they were at the end of the portion or they make it so thin with basil. We asked for some more pesto which came in a small dish. It looked just like oil, and sure enough it was almost all oil with the consistency of liquid, not a thick, oily mixture.

These were two very simple dishes that could have, and should have, been excellent and instead were very disappointing. If you are used to good Italian food, you will not find it here. You judge good italian places by the simple stuff, which should be very solid. It was anything but.

Service:

On the other hand, the staff were great and attentive. Excellent overall, as all the other reviews say!

Atmosphere:

It has the feeling of a fancy place, with really lovely bathroom and the kind of hand soap with real cloth towels. There is a nice bar area and the drinks are good. The general atmosphere is really nice, and the service is great. It's just a massive disappointment that the food is so poor.

Overall:

It feels like this could be such a good restaurant if it had a new head chef or they spent some effort on the quality of...

We visited this place because of the menu offering variety. When we arrived, we waited at the entrance to be seated for several minutes. There were plenty tables, we were just waiting to be accommodated in the table that the host would designate. To our surprise, a group of 3 men walked right through beside us ignoring we were waiting before them. They entered and seated in the bar and the worse part was that the same host we were waiting for, started serving them at the bar while we still waited to be seated. I asked him if I could go ahead and sit and he told me I had to wait. I wish I had followed the signal to have dinner in another restaurant at that moment. I didn’t. Granting an opportunity to the place, I breathed and waited to be seated. At the table, service was good. Although I had to order ice a couple of times before actually receiving it. The pizza, the pasta and the risotto were ok. Nothing to die for. The great deception was the T-bone steak. It was served completely cold. When one of the waiters asked if everything was ok I let her know that the meat came out really cold. She was really nice to offer heating our meat to which we said yes because it was really really cold. Obviously our desire for medium melted away and were handled a well done T-bone steak that at least was warm to eat. For me a complete disaster. If visiting this place, stick with the pasta or the pizzas. I was looking forward to order the tiramisu but after the T-bone fiasco I just wanted to leave this place. Super pricey. We paid $142 for 3 and only...

We must have caught this place on an off night. We came in a bit late (10:00 PM - still 2 hours before closing), and there was only one other party in the restaurant at the time. Despite the low traffic, we watched 5 or 6 employees just stand around talking for 5-10 minutes after we sat down without coming to take our order. After ordering our drinks and entrees, we again got no attention for another 15 minutes. We had to wait this long just to get our cocktails, and our meals came out at the same time. The pizza and pastas we got were both pretty bland - not bad, but nothing special. To wrap up, when we asked for the check, a tablet was plunked down on the table with no explanation, and I was left to try to decipher the Portuguese instructions until it triggered an error and I had to call over for help. Didn't feel good paying our 50+ euros for a very below average meal.

To make things even worse, during the very extended period we were waiting for our drinks, it appeared the staff was filming something for their social media. Made it clear where their...