Went for dinner last night - very disappointing experience. I do not understand how this place can have 4 stars, they do not seem to be able to run the restaurant smoothly. Perhaps the food is good - but getting it is another story.
Arrived around 7:15pm - the outdoor seating area was about half full so we decided to sit out there because of the nice evening. There was no proper host/hostess, so between the 2 waiters and 1 busboy trying to figure out which table to put us on took about 10 minutes despite an abundance of free tables.
Finally got seated - unfortunately without menus. One of us walked up and got menus for our table. After about another 10-15 minutes the waiter came over and started speaking in Portuguese, we told him that none of us speak Portuguese or Spanish. He tried explaining specials but mentioned all of them in Portuguese so I was left with no idea what the specials were. We had seen mussels on a different table - so we managed to communicate to our waiter that we wanted that.
Perhaps another 15 minutes had passed before another waiter came by to take our orders. Unfortunately he did not speak English either. We asked what the green sauce in Shrimp with Green sauce is, to which he responded, "mole verde" - which one of us figured means "green sauce" - that was his only explanation of the sauce and could not tell us what else went in it.
After placing our orders we started to notice that mostly everyone that was siting around seemed frustrated or agitated, several tables had been sitting there since we got seated (nearly 30-40 minutes ago) and had their leftovers packed and ready to go. The wait staff had not brought out the checks. A few tables got up went in to collect their own checks.
The mussels came out in the meantime and they were very good, there was a good quantity of mussels and they tasted nice and fresh.
Around 8:30pm - perhaps 45 minutes after placing our order for entrees, we were fed up/starving/hangry. No wait staff had stopped by to refill our drinks/water, so we went inside to ask for our check. We ran into the manager who said the kitchen was working on making food but wasn't sure how long it would be. When we said we just wanted our check and no longer wanted to wait, she seemed apologetic and told us we could leave.
Despite the mussels being good, the overall experience was so terrible I would never go back and I would not advise anyone to go to Heart of Portugal.
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