We were coming home to Manila from a five-day vacation in Tokyo, Japan on a four-hour flight via Cebu Pacific. Having chosen to skip the not-so-palatable plane food (which was not free by the way), we were hungry when we finally landed in Manila at 5:30 in the afternoon.
We were all craving seafood so we decided to try one of the restaurants near the Manila Bay Area.
Very popular in that area is the Dampa Seaside Market, meaning small hut, a place where there is a fresh seafood market and various restaurants that will cook the seafood that the customers have bought.
One of my nephews suggested that we go instead to Seascape Village Bay Market, an upscale version of the Dampa. It is located close to the Sofitel Hotel and the Manila Film Center.
The Seascape Village is a 2-story building housing a variety of restaurants and a wet and dry market on the ground floor. There is also an area for live band music to entertain customers while dining.
We started by selecting the fresh and live seafood that we wanted from the wet market section which is clean and orderly. Then picked Royal Kitchen, one of the restaurants in the market to cook our food, and told them how we wanted them cooked.
There is a wide variety of fish, the likes of salmon, tuna, red snapper, and many more. And look how fresh are the squids and shrimps.
The fresh fishes were cooked into sinigang na isda or fish soup with sour broth.
And the rest was made into sashimi (as if we never had enough of authentic Japanese sashimi).
The buttered shrimp, the crunchy tempura shrimp, and the calamari squid were all savory and delicious.
Plenty of shells: scallops and mussels.
Live crabs are very popular and aplenty in the wet market.
Have you guys tried the Mantis shrimp? They were put in an aquarium and the smaller ones were inside bottles.
It was cooked as buttered garlic and tasted more like lobster than shrimp. The meat is sweet and tender.
This seaweed called sea grapes is very popular in the Philippines and was served as a salad.
We all had a fill of authentic seafood dining.
To complete the dinner, we tried their mango juice presented nicely as a tulip bouquet. It was sweet!
Cheers to good food and good life!
Thank you for reading.