Cebu Dining: Fredz Carenderia

Fredz Carenderia is located beside the Lapu-Lapu Shrine. This is where we had lunch for Day 3. Our itinerary said that we were supposed to be at Sutikil Seafoods, but I’m not quite sure if Sutikil is the entire market or just a restaurant’s name. In any case, this is where I practiced my barok Cebuano skills. (I can understand Cebuano perfectly, since my Dad is from Cebu, I’m just not confident about my speaking/grammatical skills.)

Giant prawns. I was asked if I wanted the dagko or the gagmay, of course I will always go for dagko. LOL. I specifically said that I wanted tulo kabuok. I noticed she was piling them up on the scale without counting so I asked her, “Pila na?” She said, “Upat.” I almost got into an argument there, but she stopped when I started protesting.

Notes: Dako and gamay mean large and small respectively. Dagko and gagmay mean almost the same things but they’re used for classification purposes.

Pila na? = How many are they?
Tulo kabuok = Three pieces
Upat = Four

And these prawns fight like Lapu-Lapu.

You have to eat these calamares as soon as they’re served or they will fight like Lapu-Lapu, too.

I’m a certified lato (a type of seaweed) lover, so I ordered lato salad. This goes well with vinegar and calamnsi, but make sure you don’t pour the vinegar into the salad in one go or you will end up watching your lato melt within seconds.

They died bravely for our stomachs.

One thing I don’t like about this area is how it looks to be in dire need of cleaning. I respect Lapu-Lapu so much (you gotta give it to a man who is not afraid to go into battle for his beliefs) that I wish he could be surrounded by well-maintained shores and foliage.

Those huts look really interesting, though.

I’m still wondering how Magellan disembarked into this place. By very small boats, probably.

Fredz Carenderia is situated inside a wet market so I expected cheap dining. Can you imagine my shock at seeing the PhP960 bill? PhP300 of that went into “cooking”. Gad, if I had known it would be like that, I would have cooked those prawns myself.

Come to think of it, the entire time we were in Cebu, we were spending almost a thousand bucks per meal, except for CnT Lechon. It didn’t make sense to me because I used to marvel at how inexpensive everything in Cebu was. In fact, I could remember eating really good Cebuano cooking for less than PhP100. Did establishments mark up their prices because of the Sinulog Festival?

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