Porto Restaurant — Restaurant in Windermere

I booked a meal for this restaurant, I had high expectations. First of all, the reviews were misleading as to the experience we had at Porto. We ordered a bottle of red wine and the waitress put the tray with the bottle on at the end of our table - no explanation. I understand that Covid restrictions have changed the way that restaurants deliver their customer service, but there was no communication at all.

We ordered the steak medium rare. My partner’s steak was medium and the peppercorn sauce he ordered was watery with whole peppercorns in it. Both of our steaks were not seasoned, though the garlic butter helped to create some flavour to my steak. The chips were not dissimilar from those served at Wetherspoons and were unseasoned.

The manager was very apologetic and took the £2 peppercorn sauce off our £70 bill.

The final straw of poor customer service began when the waitress gave us our bill, whilst we were enjoying the rest of our bottle of wine. She then proceeded to come over with the card machine. We did not ask for the bill. This is an expensive restaurant and the reviews mislead customers into thinking they are getting a 4 star experience.

The manager, again, was very apologetic. She said she did not know why the waitress came over with the bill. As a customer, this is not reassuring that the restaurant has any idea how to deliver customer service and we were spending a lot of money. We had our bill discounted, the manager did ask us if we were happy with it and we agreed. But, our evening was wasted and the bill was still around £50.

Overall, I would not recommend Porto. We were so greatly disappointed with our experience, I refused to have a desert from this restaurant to avoid further...

The food in this charming restaurant is sublime. It’s amazing to experience fine dining food without ridiculous prices. The waitress recommended the sea bass which is excellent. I would also personally recommend the scallops to start and chocolate delice for dessert.

I booked early for a birthday meal and requested the balcony table (there’s only one) and they were thankfully able to accommodate this. It seems that they only check your booking request when you arrive however, so if you do make a request like we did for a specific table you might have to wait if someone is already there. No problem for us as the previous customers had just asked for their bill when we arrived so timing was perfect. They also add some special touches to the experience if it’s a birthday, so it’s worth letting them know. I won’t spoil this for you!

I can’t fault the food and service at all, but the reason I’ve not rated this place a five star is because they did take a while to take our orders and check on us between courses. I’m not sure if this is because our table was out of sight and therefore out of mind most of the time, or if they felt that we needed our space to enjoy the experience, I don’t know. Either way, we were there longer than we needed to be. If you’re the kind of person who goes out of their way to get attention from servers this won’t be an issue for you.

Despite that, I’d still recommend visiting this place wholeheartedly. Thanks to the staff and chef for the excellent meal and going the extra mile for our special...

Our Porto experience was lovely. I booked a table for my partners birthday and had my fingers crossed that everything would go smoothly, and even left a note on the reservation that it was his birthday so it would be appreciated if we got something a little extra special that evening. I ask for this every year, but restaurants seldom remember so I wasn’t expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised!

We were sat at a lovely booth table, with cute sparkles and a ‘happy birthday from Porto’ cutout on the table. The food….absolutely fabulous! The flavours worked so well together, and you could really taste the effort that went into each dish. The desserts were fantastic as well, and the whole evening was quite reasonably priced for the superb quality of food.

I was already pleased with the attention to detail, when we got another birthday treat in the form of small frozen ganache sweets (whatever it was, it was delicious), and a happy birthday napkin.

Overall, the experience was fabulous; the food, atmosphere, drinks, desserts, staff and the attention to my birthday request, all amazing. Thank you to the Porto team for making our visit to Windemere so special, and for making my partners birthday that much more memorable! I will recommend this restaurant to all my friends and family, and will be back...