Taverna dos Trovadores — Restaurant in Sintra

‼️TOURIST SCAM PLEASE AVOID‼️

SERVICE Thought maybe we had mistakenly walked into those Karen's diner restaurants where people are intentionally rude.

The service was awful. The waiter was extremely arrogant and rude. He would keep bumping his backside into me while I was eating and did not apologize.

WAIT TIMES Literally had enough time to write my own novel, plan my retirement while waiting for service.

We reserved a table and was seated when walked in. Waited about 30 minutes to be asked what we'd like to order. The waiter did not come up to us. I had to stand up and walk up to the waiter and told him what we wanted. He came off as annoyed and did not apologize for making us stand up to order. The food came in 45 minutes.

THE FOOD The duck was dry as the Sahara and vegetables as plain as eating a piece of paper. Tasteless. Bland. The octopus was extremely oily. We didn't order oil with octopus on the side???

THE BILL We asked for the bill and he did not give it to us. After about 20 minutes we decided to walk up to the counter so that we could pay. He handed us the EFTPOS machine, but we said we wanted to see the bill before we pay.

THE SCAM He then proceeded to firmly and rudely tell us that we do not need to see the bill and continued to pressure us in paying. We snapped back and asked for the bill AT LEAST 3 TIMES before he finally decided to let us see. We saw items that were added that we definitely did not order. The bill was in Portuguese, we were lucky there was a customer next to us that was really helpful, translated each item for us and to confirm. We found out that the waiter added chorizo and prosciutto. We told him to remove these items from the bill as we did not have them. He proceeded to remove them and didn't apologize for adding them on. We paid and left extremely unhappy about the experience.

As a tourist avoid at all costs!! Do the owners/waiters...

We came into this lovely looking restaurant in Sintra and was greeted and sat. This is when all the disasters started the waiter was erratic and completely running around like he was on a marathon but there was only 8 tables. He kept us waiting while serving everyone else around us then finally rushed to us took away our menus without even us pointing to what we would like. I asked for a fish dish baked in the oven and duck on rice and half carafe of rose without asking us he came and said we do not have any carafes but on the menu it states this, he already opened a bottle of rose and poured into our glasses and ran away, and then proceeded to charge us the wrong food, and food that we did not even have. The waiter was completely incompetent and erratic behaviour, he did not even talk to us just said what do you want and before we could even answer him he grabbed our menus and ran away so we had to shout our order at him from across the room. However the food was nice but I would avoid this place the only worse experience in Portugal in our...

Atmosphere was there, seemed authentic on arrival. But the actual food was not good, the octopus was huge but there was something not right about it- the quality was missing and the way it was cooked wasnt right. It actually put me off octopus which is one of my favourite foods… the service though was horrendous we almost walked out after trying to pay many times, we left our table, stood at the front and got ignored by the servers. The waiter would be attending to the newer larger tables of patrons.

We then got charged without receipt- i asked twice for him to print the receipt, to see we were overcharged as we did not eat any chorizo. The receipt was in portugese so not the easiest thing to understand, but as a tourist I did feel very mistreated in lack of any service and feel its google review is incredibly misleading. Will not ever come back and hope they read this review and change a lot of their attitude and cooking. Extremely disappointed and really dampened our first...