This is one of the highest reviewed restaurants in Faro on Google, it usually has lines and locals…read moreeat there too, so I thought it would for sure be good. I would give it 3 stars for the food but because of our experience when paying I am reducing to 2 stars.
We arrived just before they opened at 7 pm as recommended by reviews and there was no line. Once we were seated, the restaurant did fill up quite quickly after but I did not notice a line.
Although it was recommended, we did not order the francesinha because we had plenty of those in Porto, where they are known for it. We ordered a fried cod fritter (bacalhau) to try, which was fine. I think it was like 1€. As an appetizer, we got the pica-pau, which was 6€. It was basically salty/sour pork chunks with pickled vegetables in a sauce. It was pretty salty so we had to order a bread basket to go with it.
For our mains, we got the seafood rice (17.50€) and razor clam rice (16€). We had asked the waiter if they were similar, because we didn't want two things that were too similar, and he said yes but also they were different. I do think they are very similar though, the rice part is essentially the same but the toppings were just slightly different. The seafood might have made the flavour a bit sweeter, possibly. Anyway, out of the 2, I would recommend the seafood rice as it included some razor clams too. Both came with generous portions of seafood and razor clams. I did notice at least half of the razor clams we received still had sand in them, but according to the owner's response in some Google reviews, that's normal? Anyway, like the pica-pau, the rice and sauce was incredibly salty and garlicy. Perhaps that's the Portuguese style? I am no expert, but it was significantly saltier and garlic-heavier than all the other Portuguese meals we had on our trip. If the rice dishes were not so overly salty, it would have been really tasty.
Up until now I would give them 3 stars, rounded up, as service was fine up to this point and food was okay (albeit very salty). However, once it was time for us to pay, we had a really poor experience. First, since they were busy and only have 2 front-line staff, it took awhile for them to bring the bill etc. Then, when we tried to pay with our credit card, their machine declined us, and we tried multiple times, using Apple Pay and also the physical card itself. They had another machine for local cards, which they let us try as well and it did not work either. We ended up feeling forced to pay with cash, 45€, which was annoying as we did not bring a ton of cash on our trip since we planned to mostly use credit card.
I find it really strange that this happened, because we had been using that same card for our entire trip. Not only did we not have any issues for the previous 6 days, but we had just used the same card the day of, for lunch, Bolt, and snacks in Faro. We also continued to use the card with no issues for the remainder 6 days of the trip. Basically throughout the trip, we used the card 5-10 times a day, without issue, so I'm very certain that nothing was wrong with our card at the time we paid for our meal. Therefore I can only assume the issue was on the restaurant's end, and I don't know if it was intentional or not, or the reason they decided to do this, but it certainly was a poor experience for us. I felt as if we were taken advantage of somehow as obvious tourists.
I would not recommend to anyone visiting Faro.
