Seafood Market of Manila, The Philippines

At the seafood market of Manila, the food experience is highly interactive. You enter, and walk through an alley way where the fish smells immediately overwhelm. All of a sudden, "buy my lobster, ma'am". "You want squid, ma'am". "Big tiger prawns.. ma'am." The most polite way I've ever been hassled, but being hassled all the same. Rows and rows of women sitting in buckets of live crabs, followed by mountains of mussels, and aquariums of you name it. And the best part? This is where you pick your food, and then, voila, a restaurant next door cooks it for you.

We decided on "Squared", one of the many restaurants adjacent to the market. Our waitor, Jerry, took us on a tour where we were to decide our seafood items. Each vendor tries to reel you in (no pun intended). This man showed us his tiger prawns and crabs, hoping to win our money over his next door neighbor.

The food is fresh, exotic, authentic. Take a look at the colors of these lobsters! These are no shabby crustaceans.
We obviously started by choosing a lobster. What is a gourmet seafood feast without lobster? After weeding through the blues, greens, and pinks of the regular lobsters, we chose our future meal. Weighing in at a whopping 2.3 kilos, here's our first course:

Next, were the shrimps. A half kilo of these meaty crawlers, freshly iced.

Monica wanted to try shelled fish. I think she thought the whole open-swallow-chew process would be fun. But for a non fish eater, that's a pretty bold move. We landed on mussels, which seemed the tamest of our options. Next were scallops, my dad's favorites.And then... freshly caught before our eyes... a live lapu-lapu fish.
Here is Jerry, carrying our catch to the restaurant.
Next, it was on us to decide how each should be cooked. The lighting in the restaurant wasn't condusive to good photos, but here are a few:

Lapu-Lapu, steamed with soy sauce.Scallops, purely baked. Naked.And... oh baby... a monster of a lobster loaded with sweet chili sauce.
And then of course, we had the mussels steamed with onion dipping sauce, and the shrimp cooked with butter-garlic amazingness.

My clear winner was the lobster. I wanted to put the sauce all over me and live in a bucket of it. I loaded up a bowl with rice, lobster, sauce, and the eggplant we ordered for my vegetarian friends (if I can even call them friends when they skipped this amazing meal...). The combinations were superb. Lobster is just so thick, so real, and you forget that you're eating about a billion calories of cholesterol because you just float on an indulgent cloud until you explode from fullness.

Monica liked the shrimp best, but mostly for the sauce (can't really go wrong with garlic and butter.) The texture of shrimp prompted a large debate at the table. The outcome was negligible because all I really learned was that real fish eaters like shrimp, and people who don't like shrimp texture are just not made for fine dining.

I would also like to note that fish is best when cooked in a light sauce. I felt that way in Turkey, and tonight's soy sauce subtelty only reinforced my theory. Just a reminder for the next time I cook fish.

And finally, for us real fish lovers: naked scallops are wonderful. If you can handle them in sauce, you should be able to appreciate them plain. And really, the same goes for mussels. I may have learned tonight that all those shell-creatures (oysters, mussels, etc...) are not just for the experience, but can also be a real delicacy. I'm not saying I'm jumping for the next opportunity to slip that slime down my throat, but I am starting to like them for their taste.

I don't know how this always happens, but once again, at the end of the meal all the empty dishes were crowded around yours truly. Mmm... worth it though. All my stomach pain and fullness... so worth it.