Finally on our way to try one of Boracay’s top suggested seafood dining experience – D’Talipapa! 

It was our 4th day when we had the chance to visit the place. We took a tricycle to D’Talipapa but you can always walk if that’s what you prefer. It is located somewhere between station 1 and 2, same street as McDonalds (btw there are 2 McDonalds in the island, one at D’mall (station 2) along the main street and the other one near D’Talipapa).

D’Talipapa is basically a wet market known for having the island’s best fresh seafood.

You can find pasalubong shops along the way to the main market. I heard the pasalubong items here are cheaper compared to those at D’mall.

You will find a wide variety of fresh and live seafood here at D’Talipapa’s wet market, from shrimps/prawns, lobsters, crabs, squids, different types of fish, shells, oysters, scallops and many more. Its definitely a heaven for all seafood lovers!

Read on as I will be sharing you a breakdown of what we got for lunch and also a few tips we learned during our visit.

I remembered my friend Fennie and I really wanted to have scallops but it was so expensive that we decided to pass.

If where you are staying has a cooking area and you prefer to cook all you bought from the market yourself then that would save you much money especially if you are on a budget trip but if your place doesn’t have any cooking area like ours then no worries because just within the area of the wet market are these resto offering “Paluto” aka cooking services of the seafood you just bought. They usually charge you per kilo per dish depending on what kind of paluto yoou prefer. You can have it grilled, steamed, garlic buttered stir fried or made into a soup. Yummm!

For us, we decided to dine and have our seafood cooked at Sowerby’s. We heard so many good reviews about the place and we are about to prove it ourselves!

“Best tasting cooking service at D’Talipapa. Fast and Cheap!”

It was surely fast! I didn’t expect for them to finished our dish that fast. Except for the grilled squid though as they were just preparing the grill after we submit our orders.

We bought a kilo of shrimp. We had half of it garlic buttered and half into a Sinigang Soup.
(Ugh writing this seriously makes me drool! T_T definitely not a good idea on a empty stomach)

We also had grilled squid and some baked oysters.

Just look at those smile on our faces. LOL I tell you it was a superb meal! It was A LOT we couldn’t even finish everything (I say A LOT considering me and my two other friends are such big eaters). We had it packed and decided to have what is left for dinner.

Here are our breakdown:

P170 – 1 pc large squid
P50 – 1kilo of oysters
P450 – 1kilo of shrimp
This is already enough for us and like i said, we had 1/2 of it garlic buttered and 1/2 of it into a soup. For the soup, we barely touched the shrimp in it considering we had the garlic buttered already and only consumed the soup for lunch but we still had so much soup left and basically 1/2 of shrimp in it so we saved it up for dinner.

Paluto/cooking service at Sowerby’:

P150 – paluto for shrimp singang soup
P150 – paluto for garlic buttered shrimp
P100 – paluto for the grilled squid
P180 –  paluto for baked oyster
———————-
P25 – cup of rice
P85 – 1.5L of sprite

We payed a total of P1,510 making us payed around 500 each since there’s 3 of us. Not bad for a very superb meal!

Tips and tricks

1. It is definitely much more cheaper if you’re travelling in groups.
The more people to divide the total expenses, the better.

2. Bargain. Bargain. Bargain.
This is where you haggling skills comes in handy. Vendors tend to offer you the highest price they can especially if you are travelling with a foreigner. Don’t hesitate to bargain (lets say like 2/3 of what they offer). There are a lot of other vendors with the same seafood right next to each other and if the 1st vendor wont buy your offer then just go, walk out and on to the next one. 90% of the time the vendors will call your attention and are willing to negotiate with you until both of you agreed on a price and be happy with it. They wont let you leave until you end up buying from them!

3. Go early.
It was lunch time and it was the perfect time for us. I heard it gets packed during evening and the vendors are less likely to bargain with you since there are much more other customers to accommodate.

4. Get help from a waitress of a Paluto restaurant.
I’m not sure it this is applicable during the evening since the place will get packed up with people but when we arrived there during lunch time, this lady from Sowerby’s offered to help us in buying seafood at the wet market. She was basically our guide while inside the market. She lead us to the cheapest offer she know where we got our shrimp and also helped us bargain with the vendor too.

5. You can buy more and save some for dinner.
Tipid tip! We didn’t really realized this until we couldn’t finish what we had for lunch. We had so much soup and squid left that we decided to save it up for dinner. We had refrigerator back at the hotel so we just store it inside until dinner time. We only bought rice near our hotel and re heated the soup using the water heater and steamed the squid (that is wrapped in foil) on top of that water heater we had at the hotel. Viola! Instant dinner! (photo below)

Our visit to D’Talipapa was certainly one of the highlights of this trip when it comes to food. And like what they said, your Boracay trip won’t be complete without a visit to D’Talipapa!

More of my Boracay series here, here and here.
Until the next post!

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