Seafood Friday Week 1 @ Lucky Seafood

It's Lent again...

and that means the return of Seafood Fridays...


Earlier this evening, we went up to the Manila Mesa area for a book reading by a friend of ours. However, before the literary event, we stopped by Lucky Seafood for our early dinner.

The last time I ate at Lucky's in-store restaurant was during my pre-blogging days (pre-March 2006). I believe Lotus and I met up with Bert and Superman for lunch here. This was also when I only ate pho at Vietnamese restaurants and my food horizons weren't as wide.

When you walk in, the restaurant is to your left. Just walk past the cool Asian snacks...

Now we are inside...

Sparse condiments (Sriracha, chili garlic sauce and Hoisin):

I was hoping they would have shrimp or fish in their menu items...

We'd all end up getting an item with shrimp.

Pat attention to #53 - Ground Shrimp BALL soup...

I'd forgotten how spacious it was inside...


Our dinner - spring rolls (for TC) and our soups and bun. They were generous with the herb plate here. There were sprigs of mint, basil, a heart shaped leaf herb which I later found out to be "diep ca" or "fish mint", along with saw leaf herb.

TC's shrimp soup:

Bert's shrimp bun.

He said their nuoc cham tasted different than the other places we've been too. I thought it was way too sweet and almost tasted like it had five spice powder in it.

Now it's back to #53, the so-called shrimp BALL soup.  See any BALLZ in there?

I was expecting those spongy shrimp balls. Instead, there were real shrimps (which was nice) and some weird worm shaped shrimp paste thing.  Also, smack dab in the middle was this...

A pig part. Maybe part of the foot? I ended up fishing it out. I wasn't expecting this to be in my seafood soup, so that was kind of funny.

As for these shrimp tube things. I'd never seen them before. Maybe they ran out of the balls? They didn't really have much of a taste either. The tubes were on the bland side.

The abundance of herbs made the soup taste a little better. We enjoyed a leisurely meal before heading back to the market to pick up a few snack items.

Who else went to Lucky Seafood Restaurant?
Cindy has a post  from March 2012 which also links Kirk's ancient post from 2006. Both had been there countless times, but those are the existing posts. You'll notice that prices have gone up since Kirk's initial post from eight years ago.

Last visit to Lucky Seafood:
December 2013 - when I went to Gemmae Bakeshop and Vinh Hung.

I also saw this older post from Indirect Heat, a blogger I didn't know about (who used to live in San Diego). Sometimes I use Kirk's "google search" function just to see what pops up and this one did. Glad I checked out his blog - he has a lot of cool recipes on there.

The next stop of the night was our author friend's literary event at Miramar College featuring excerpts from her new book, "The Mango Bride"...