• 5
• Amazing food

The food temple was one of my first reviews on happycow many years ago, back then I have it 4 stars because even though the food was already great, the service was very bad. Now a days the food is even better, but the service is still a problem... Even though we're talking about totally different people.. but I guess learned to just accept it there.. Going back even more for some context. I've been to the food temple dozens of times since it opened, I remember when it was a really small, quite unknown restaurant on the first couple of weeks and the work of Alice, a Canadian expat in Lisbon who opened a good vegan restaurant when we had very few. The food was good from the get go. Obviously throughout the year it has some ups and downs, but it was always solid to go there, you knew you would get good food. Some quality peaks of the food were close to the first time they did a Santos Populares party and were grilling tempeh burgers outside (they didn't do Santos Populares this year...wtf Food Temple?), also during the pandemic peak when they were service takeaway food and both the vegan meatballs and the eggplant focaccia were so good that I'm quite sad they don't have it anymore in the menu. And.. Last Friday. I went there and the food was at the top again, it was really really good and tasty and perfectly executed all the dishes except the potatoes eggplant one were great, and so was dessert. So the food is not even 5* right now, is 6*. The venue is amazing and the experience to sit in the stairs (didn't exist for the first few years) is also amazing. Now let's get to the elephant in the room: the service. Throughout the years it has had ups and downs, was quite decent at some point, really bad at others like around 2016, and to this day it's still very inconsistent and ok in some days, quite poor on others.. Like this last Friday. It was hard to watch some customers not getting their main dish for quite a while (we were lucky and got ours like 20 minutes before then while they had asked before us), you get asked the same questions several times by different people "you guys want dessert?" and it's just chaos. Doesn't match the food quality at all. Simple things like assigning tables to each server instead of having everyone everywhere would already fix a big part of the chaos. All this said, I totally recommend this place, please do a Reservation or else most likely you won't have a place, and enjoy a great meal. Updated from previous review on 2014-12-14