Ocean Garden Seafood Restaurant: Cebu’s Best-Kept Secret

Whenever I travel somewhere, I make sure that I know someone who lives in my destination, or I ask my friends to hook me up with someone who’ll be willing to take me around. I love seeing a new city through a local’s eyes, plus they always know the best places to eat. When I was in Cebu for the Sinulog festival, I met up with my friend Kaith, a fellow blogger I briefly met while she was in Manila. For three days, she took me to all sorts of awesome places to eat, one of which is Ocean Garden in Lahug. I’d been hankering for some seafood after days of eating meat, and this low-key restaurant is the place to get it.

Ocean Garden is literally a hidden treasure. It’s located in a residential area of Lahug, and you have to travel through dark narrow streets to get there. Most cabs don’t even know where it is, so I recommend that you ask a foodie friend with a car to bring you there. Trust me, the trip is worth it.

Ocean Garden is part seafood market, part restaurant. They have an offering of fresh seafood that they will cook in any way you want them, as well as pork, chicken, and beef if you’re feeling more carnivorous. The food is very inexpensive; each dish is good for sharing and is priced at under P250.

If you can’t decide how you want your crab or your fish, you can select from their best-sellers posted on the wall.

I asked Kaith to recommend dishes to eat, and she picked one of her favorites – stir-fried scallops with assorted vegetables. The vegetables were lightly cooked and covered in delicious sauce, and the scallops were a delight to chew on. If there were more of us eating, I would have insisted on ordering seconds.

I requested that we have shrimp in butter and garlic, which is the tastiest, if not the healthiest way to enjoy shrimp. We also had a third dish, scallops baked in cheese and garlic, but we devoured it before I remembered to take a photo. Our total bill amounted to P602, which is pretty cheap considering we had three dishes and two bottomless drinks.

If you’ve got the transportation, I highly recommend that you drop by Ocean Garden for your fresh seafood fix. The food is fantastic, the ambiance is pretty great (there’s a garden area where you can sit and enjoy the cool night breeze while you dine), and everything is reasonably priced. Ocean Garden is just a few streets away from the Petron station in Lahug. Here’s a map that will help you get there.

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