Restaurante Martinhal — Restaurant in Vila do Bispo

Mediocre food but VERY slow service. From reading reviews we were aware that the service here can be slow, but given that we were on holiday and not in a hurry we thought it would be OK. However, we were unprepared for just how slow it could be. We were offered starters of breads and mackerel pate very soon after we arrived, but after that it was downhill. The waitress came to take our order, but one of our party was at the bathroom so we asked her to come back in 2 minutes. She didn’t come back for over half an hour. However, the view from the balcony is superb and the weather was great so the wait passed easily enough. Having ordered the main courses, we were waiting a LONG time. After about an hour I asked one of the waiters if he could find out where our meals were. He mumbled something incoherent and wandered off, but never came back to update us. After another 15 or 20 minutes I went into the main restaurant and found our waitress. She told me it would be another 5 minutes. Having waited so long I thought another 5 minutes would be OK. After another 20 minutes I was getting pretty exasperated and went back to find the waitress again. She assured me that it was ready and would be out right away and sure enough it was served very shortly afterwards. The quality of the dishes was not great and certainly not worth a long wait. I note that other reviewers have given the food glowing reviews, so perhaps we just hit on a bad day. My meal (vegetarian burger) was like a cheap ready meal you would get in a supermarket and my kids said the spaghetti bolognese tasted like school dinner (I don’t think that’s a compliment). So my usual acid test is the question “would I go back?” The...

I was really angry when I left the restaurant, but after some hours of I wanted to be as honest for the description of the experience as possible.

So why do I rate 2 stars:

The pros: The view was amazing and the service at least tried to give us a good experience. Beer wasn't that expensive.

The cons: I ordered a special salad of the house. It was a combination of cabbage (maybe 50%) some carrots, 5 shrimps and maybe 0,5% of Surimi. The rest was filled up with, little to no special taste, cocktail sauce. It was mostly like sugar and combined with some tomato. But mostly sugar. For me this doesn't correlate with a price of 15€ compared to the food we already got in Portugal within the last days.

The other dish was chicken served with chips and rice, even when we wanted to get some more rice instead of the chips. "Chicken" means lots of bones and even more fat. Grilled in a lot of fat. We expected some grilled chicken and not that.

All in all there are lots of things to improve, but this location deserves a better restaurant. I hope you can...

We had a great time here. Great beach view. Great local food. We ordered catch-of-the-day: seabass and dorade 🐟 , with salad and potatoes. Our son went for the burger 🍔. As sides we had the sauteed vegetables and a salad.

Hard working, friendly owner and her staff.

Attention for detail, the toilets were decent as well :) They also clearly indicate that they do not belong to the neighbouring Martinhal hotel.

We truly don't understand the relative low rating of this place (3.8 stars). Perhaps people are confused with the neighbors, that place was a totally non inspiring, opposite experience....