Dom Mário is hands down the best restaurant on Ilha Grande in Abraão!…read more Make a reservation if you're coming with a large group or on the island during the busy season or holiday week, as they don't have all that many tables. You start off with a bread basket and homemade butter with herbs and they had lots of English music playing on the speakers throughout the night. That butter though. Try at least one of the many caipirinha or caipiroska varieties for 12-14 reais each. I tried the maracuja com gengibre (passion fruit/ginger) and maracuja com manjericão (passion fruit/basil) and loved both of them. If you're a foreigner ie non-Brazilian, let them know if you prefer more or less cachaça in your caipirinha to get the drink of your taste. Vegetarian dishes are very sparse here, though my waitress did mention they had a veggie risotto that wasn't on the menu and they may have others as well. They are mostly known for their seafood dishes. I enjoyed my filet with gorgonzola sauce too. The restaurant is al fresco with a covered roof. Some of the tables are in the sand, so you can feel like you're on the beach even though you're a few steps away from the sounds of the waves crashing in. All around, a great experience and not so in your face of a tourist trap like the beachfront restaurants.

Awesome food. We had the fish with the passionfruit sauce, amazingly. Nice service and place to…read morehave a good night.

The food is light and well seasoned, taste like authentic Brasilian food. I have had the n 1 dish…read morefrom the menu ( this dish won a golden fork reward) . A very great way to start my trip at the island . The servers are great people and ready to help. The restaurant is right at the beach, with a fantastic view. I recommend this place.

The restaurant is right on the beach, so the view is just awesome. However, the taste of the food…read morecould not match the quality of the view. We ordered fried squid and stewed fish. Both were good but not great. They also have a really high wait time. In this island, this is probably among the expensive ones. For some reason, they charge (it is optional) for music.

Delicious! The moqueca was amazing, the drinks satisfying, and the staff very friendly. Three of us…read moreshared the moqueca and it was plenty. We actually went back the next night to get the filet with the shrimp sauce (the one many people had raved about in other reviews) and it was also very good. The fried fish was crispy and light and fresh, the sauce was very similar to the moqueca, which was just fine with us. Go here!

Nice place with colonial ambiance in the middle of "restaurant row" on Samuel Costa Street, just up…read morethe block from our favorite restaurant in town, Bartholomeu (see my review). My wife had shrimp tossed in pasta, and I had a crusted filet of fish over risotto, and both were excellent. Service is prompt and cordial. Very little English spoken, but the menus have English translations. Wine & beer served. Of the two (this one and Bartholomeu), we preferred the latter -- but if you have two nights in town I would definitely suggest trying them both; can't go wrong with either one. Brazilians dine relatively late, so if you arrive at either one in the 6:00-to-7:00 range there is no need for reservations.

We are on a 2 week honeymoon in Brazil and this may have been our best meal. The bread is…read morespectacular, and they brought out some free appetizers including smoked fish, pumpkin soup, and a croquette that was amazing. We then had some cheese balls as another appetizer, and then the crusted fish and squid risotto for dinner all of which was excellent. The service was top notch and we felt that it was a meal that merited a tip beyond the usual 10%. Highly creative and delicious meal that we strongly recommend. Also very cute restaurant and decor.

Great food and large portions. Great service and nice quiet place. I would definitely recommend…read morethis place for those familiar and new to Brazilian seafood.

The ambiance at this place is great but the service and food are not…read more We ordered sautéed shrimp for appetizers which were good but rather oily. We got the steak for dinner, the portion was for 2 people but the meat but very fatty and tough. Service is slow and rather inconsiderate. When the table behind us asked for napkins, the waiter looked at our table where our main course had just been cleared up and snatched the napkins from our table to put on theirs. Such an odd thing to do! I would come back for drinks on the beach and the live music but I wouldn't eat here again.

I know you're just thinking of all the churrascarias you wanna try in Rio, but I will tell you, one…read morenot-to-miss thing in Rio is seafood. I mean, the ocean is RIGHT THERE. I don't know why meat became king here. Specifically, you must try MOQUECA. Moqueca is basically a medium thick seafood stew (typically fish, but can be any seafood) served in a clay pot with a side of white rice (not sticky). It tastes and looks kinda tomato-based, but doesn't taste very tomato-y like a tomato bisque, minestrone, or gazpacho. So if you don't like tomatoes normally, you won't find moqueca offensive--I, in fact, dislike tomato-based soups, but this was fine. I found Nomangue because I wanted to try seafood in Rio, I wanted something close by, and I wanted something delicious. Lo-and-behold, I head to a nearby bank, walk for one minute down the street from my hotel, the Miramar Hotel by Windsor, and I stumble upon a very cute wooden exterior and a big crab logo. SOLD. It's very modern and clean inside with cute sea-faring based decor and it seemed like a good amount of the staff spoke English. Our waiter spoke little English, but luckily the hubs has decent Portuguese (filled in with Portuguese-inflected Spanish lol). Also, ordering in restaurants is basically just pointing, and if necessary they call the English-speaking staff over. I figured out this restaurant gets a good amount of U.S. tourists because we Americans love photos of food and before we even had a moment to ask about different dishes on the menu, the waiter pulled out an iPad with photos of everything on the menu. BRILLIANT AND A GOD-SEND. It's a casual restaurant, but the service is like a five-star damn restaurant. The staff is dressed nice and treat you really well and pour your wine and the dishes are presented beautifully, but then you use a paper napkin to wipe your mouth and we fit in with shorts, shirts, and flip flops (aka Havaianas of course). I found this same story in all of South America. Here, we have specific service levels based on the type of restaurant or cafe--sometimes you're served fully, sometimes you're only served partially, sometimes you get your own food, sometimes you get a number and they bring it to you but don't come back, it's all so confusing. There, they serve you at EVERY restaurant like it's a fancy one. LOVE. We went all seafood and ordered a delicious trio platter of fresh seafood with various sauces as an appetizer and decided on the octopus moqueca for our main course. They served it in full attached tentacle fashion and I'm sure the waiter saw our confused faces and immediately went into "these are Americans"-mode and offered to cut it apart for us like babies. TENDER, TENDER, TENDER is all I can say about the octopus. AND FRESH AND DELICIOUS. And of course very filling. Okay, so I said like 4 things about it. I can't recommend the octopus moqueca enough. We of course paired it with a Brazilian white wine and ended our meal with a cheese ice cream and sliced guava dessert. I think cheese and guava is a thing in Brazil. And it's now a thing in our damn household coz that combo found a new taste bud orgasm I didn't think I had. It was like the number 6 orgasm if we're talking in Monica from "Friends" speak. Total cost in U.S. dollars (at the Nov '18 exchange rate of 3ish reals: 1 usd) for great service, a 3-seafood platter appetizer, a few glasses of wine, fresh octopus moqueca, and a nice dessert = $88, with tip included. Easily over $100 in LA. Not bad, not bad at all! To top it all off, they had a random guitar player and fantastic singer performing in the corner ever so gently as a soundtrack to our night. Voice ON POINT. Most of the songs I didn't know as they were in Portuguese (and one in French), but they were lovely AF. She did play "Put Your Records On" for us English speakers and unbeknownst to her, I annoyingly made it a duet. I wish we could've tipped her but we didn't see a jar and I didn't wanna seem patronizing or awkward. LOVED IT ALL. I'm sure there are several places to try seafood and moqueca in Rio, but this is my rec. It's on a street right off Copacabana Beach. And if you stay at the lovely Miramar Hotel by Windsor, this place is a must. Viva moqueca!!

Not on Copacabana beach anymore. 1 hour drive from Copacabana to get there…read more However, there is a good ceviche place next to the Marriott on CC beach