A Traineira — Restaurant in Santa Cruz

We had booked a table for 6 and ordered the mixed fish dish for 4 of us. The waiter was stressed and in a hurry from the start, he was not service minded. When the order arrived the selection of fish and its presentation was mediocre and nothing to write home about. To top it all the service was non existent from beginning to end after taking our order the original waiter had better things to do and never showed up again. The other waiters din’t seem to know very much and when we asked for an introduction of the different fishes we had ordered they could not answer. The other fish we ordered was tuna and it was obviously frozen and dried out. The starter we ordered was limpets which cost 18€, but they were not fresh either and tasted like garlic rubber! We had a child with us and asked about child portions but no they gave us a full adult portion. I don’t understand how Traineira gets away with this quality of food and bad service. They seem to be selective as to whom they serve well and whom they simply ignore. When we were leaving we noticed that the waiter had forgotten to pour out the rest of the wine and there was still 1/4 bottle left, just to show how attentive they were. One of the guests got a piece of glass in her mouth from a glass that cracked as she was drinking from it. No I don’t recommend this...

I rarely leave reviews, because most of the times the places are rated correctly (imo, of course). This is not the case. We waited at the door for someone to arrange the seating and had no reaction for quite some time (not a problem, wouldn't even mention it, if it was not for all the other stuff). Obviously understaffed and definitely not the fault of waiters. The food is what could've changed the first appearance, but it failed quite impressively - the Trainiera salad was a weird mix of not very good ingredients, the chicken (you'd think it would be the safest option, but no) and the tuna steak Madeira style were both hard, and the steak had a strong fish flavour, which usually doesn't happen with a good ingredients and chef. On top of that one of the garnishes had some hard thing inside you can actually break your tooth with, and another had some weird red string. Oh, and when you order an onion soup, you'd expect to have one, not a tomato soup without a hint of onion. Definitely the worst place we've eaten so far in our two trips to Madeira, would...

This was a recommendation from the locals. I did not enjoy the experience.

Service- you need to wait 5-10 mins every time you need a servers attention. One server doesn’t serve a table but I was helped by 4 different staff members and took forever to get help. They only stop for a few seconds and you need to make up your mind by then.

Food- definitely not fresh and they defend it’s the greatest thing. When they asked me how my cod was- I said “inedible and salty and I couldn’t eat more than a few bites” I asked for a slice of lemon hoping that would fix it and they brought it after 5-10 mins after me reminding them again. It still had too much salt on it even after me scraping off all the salt. It was just preserved in salt solution or something.

When I told the server the cod was too salty and I couldn’t eat. He replied “oh the cod we get here is always salty, I warn all customers usually”. Dude- you think I have never had cod before?

Overall the worst experience I have had...