The Sunday Tabuan, Oroquieta: Seafood Straight Off the Boat

Tabuan is the Bisaya word for market day, and in Oroquieta City that day is Sunday. Once a week the city proper fills with stalls, the boats come in with the morning catch, farmers come down from the Malindang side with fruit and vegetables, and the whole province seems to turn up to eat. It is the best single morning you can spend in Misamis Occidental, and it costs almost nothing.

What you will find

Seafood, first and above everything. Fish laid out on ice and banana leaf, crab, shrimp, squid, shellfish, and the things you do not see in a city supermarket: sea urchin, sea cucumber, and jellyfish, sold and eaten the way they have been here for generations. A visiting food vlogger called it the wildest seafood market in the Philippines, and once you have watched a stallholder open a sea urchin for a customer standing at the table, you will see why.

The point of the Tabuan is that it is cooked for you. Pick what you want from the stall, and it goes on the grill or into the pot right there. Grilled fish, kinilaw made to order, shrimp in the shell, sinugba of whatever came in that morning. You eat at plastic tables with a view of the stall it came from.

Around the seafood is everything else a provincial market carries. Fruit by the basket, vegetables from the uplands, native cakes and kakanin, rice, and the general run of things people come into town on a Sunday to buy.

When to go

Early. The catch lands at dawn and the best of it is gone by mid morning. Arriving at seven puts you there with the locals, with the full choice, before the heat. By eleven it is thinner and hotter, and by the afternoon it is packing up. It is a Sunday only market, so plan the trip around it; on any other day you will find the ordinary public market and not this.

What to bring

Cash, in small notes. Nobody at a fish stall takes a card. A bag for fruit if you are heading onwards. An appetite, and a willingness to point at something you do not recognise and ask what it is. People are proud of this market and happy to explain it.

Getting there

The Tabuan is in Oroquieta City proper. Any tricycle in the city will take you, and on a Sunday morning you can also follow the crowd. Oroquieta is the provincial capital, about an hour up the coast from Ozamiz City and its airport, with buses and vans running all day. From AMORAP in Sinacaban it is around half an hour north.

Make a Sunday of it

Eat early, then walk it off around the city plaza with its old bandstand and the Capitol grounds across the road. Oroquieta calls itself the City of Good Life, and a Sunday here is the argument for it. In the afternoon the beaches of Plaridel are up the coast, and Cotta Fort in Ozamiz is an hour the other way.

Oroquieta's restaurants, shops and places to stay are on our local business directory, along with the rest of the province. If you run one of them, get it listed.