Alex W.
Yelp
We had a very disappointing experience here, both with regard to service and food.
Service: we arrived and were seated, given a food menu but no drinks menu for some reason. We waited for quite some time for anyone to come to our table to offer us anything. Eventually a waiter showed up, and without so much as a hello or good evening, let alone an offer to answer questions (despite many opaquely named dishes on the menu) or to get us a drinks list, he just asked "have you chosen?". His service continued to be indifferent, bordering on rude, throughout the meal. We also had some service at times from another waitress, who was better but still not great. They didn't seem to co-ordinate with each other very well, either: we would order something from one, then the other would show up and ask us what we wanted to order, and so on. Just before our main dishes arrived my partner ordered a glass of wine, which never arrived, and the wine menu was taken away before I had the chance to order a glass for myself. No-one voluntarily checked in on us or asked us how the food was, even when one dish was clearly not getting eaten (see below).
Food: we ordered the potato skins to start, which were fine but needed more salt. For our main dishes I had the turbot, which was mediocre - overwhelmed in a very sugary beet risotto - but essentially OK. By contrast, my partner's dish - octopus in a spicy, sweet sauce - was inedible. The octopus was overcooked and rubbery, and the sauce was congealed on the plate and completely lacked the promised spice. She wasn't able to finish more than a few bites.
When a waitress came to clear the dishes (long after I'd finished my dish, and with only a few bites of my partner's dish touched), my partner complained about her dish. The waitress didn't react very well initially, but to be fair, she took the dish back to the kitchen and then came back and said the kitchen admitted that the dish was not up to standard and that the octopus was overcooked. As an apology she sent us a dessert, which was a guava sorbet with a biscuit base and a cheese foam, and which was fine. The free dessert was a nice gesture, but when the bill came, the restaurant had still charged us for the octopus, which was not OK given that it was so bad that we couldn't eat it, and that the kitchen had admitted as much. We complained again and then they agreed to take off the charge for the octopus. Again, good that they did so, but we shouldn't have needed to insist.
Drinks: we ordered two of the supposedly famous cocktails, both of which were fine but fairly one-dimensional in flavor profile and lacked kick. As mentioned above, we never got to try the wine.
Ambience: the vibe, with almost clubby music, is stylish and works well late at night. There is a part of the bar/restaurant that allows smoking and there's no door between it and the main restaurant, which allows smoke to drift through to where you're eating, especially if you're seated toward the front of the restaurant, as we were.
Even if we bracket the saga with the octopus dish, the food was mediocre and the service indifferent, and the prices are really very high for Lisbon. We were sad to have wasted one of our meals in Lisbon on this restaurant when there are so many other great options in town.