Portofino Bay Hotel, Universal Boulevard, Orlando

Travel distance/time from Florida Delight (26 miles: 41 minutes)

Portofino Bay Hotel near to Universal Studios was recommended to us by a local as a nice place to go for a meal in the evening as it is really quite a unique place. When you arrive at the hotel parking is in a large multi storey car park but if you buy any food at one of the hotel’s restaurants they will validate your car parking ticket so that it is free to exit.

When you get to the entrance of the hotel you walk down some steps and find yourself in a large Italian piazza overlooking a lake. Various restaurants and bars surround the piazza. On the evening that we were there which was in May 2016 it was surprisingly very quiet especially bearing in mind that it is a popular hotel for people to stay who want to go to Universal Studios and a small ferry for hotel guests runs from a jetty on the lake to the theme park . It is a lovely place to sit out in the square and enjoy a drink especially as each evening there is free entertainment in the form of a couple of opera singers who come out onto a balcony of the hotel and give a 20 minute or so performance to the audience in the piazza. The time may vary slightly when the do this but when we were there they came out and performed at 8.30pm.

Afterwards we had dinner in the Italian restaurant called Mama Della’s Ristorante.  It was busy despite the area being quiet so we were glad we reserved a table an hour before we wanted to eat. The meal was nice but in my personal opinion nothing special and more expensive and not as good a somewhere like the chain restaurant Olive Garden. However Mama Della’s is not a chain which makes a nice change and the location was very nice.

We will definitely return to Portofino Bay Hotel in the future to spend an evening there again but next time we will try the Thirsty Fish Restaurant which is next to the edge of the lake and was in fact where we had been given the recommendation to eat but we went for the Italian option instead on this occasion.

We would recommend an evening here as it is just so different to other venues and in the evening when it gets dark it is very pretty with the lights reflecting off the lake