Let me first talk about Mercado 28 a little bit. Mercado 28 is a full city block-sized market jammed with vendors selling all sorts of trinkets. Several restaurants are interspersed through Mercado 28. The market vendors, understandably so, are very aggressive in trying to get you to stop and look at/buy their wares.
An important point, if you drove to Mercado 28 and parked there at night, be very very cognizant of where you have parked. What I'm getting at is that there are four parking lots at Mercado 28. They are configured around the market like blades on a windmill, and the parking lots all look alike. When you exit the maze of vendor stalls to one of the lots, you may not be aware of which exact parking lot you are in - and when you don't see your car, you might gasp, "Our car has been stolen!"
But keep calm, your car has not been stolen. You are in the wrong lot. Simply walk around the block and check out the next parking lot. And if it is not there either, proceed to the next lot. In our case, we finally found our car in the very last parking lot. Sigh of relief.
Los Jarochos is a seafood/cockteleria restaurant in Mercado 28. We picked here for having dinner because it was crowded, usually an indication of good quality. As it turned, out a couple of our dishes were wonderful and the rest less impressive, but still decent.
We were served complimentary tortilla chips that lack crispness, seemingly having absorbed Cancun's humidity. But I quickly forgot about the chips as I dove into my delicious crema de langosta (lobster) soup (which also contained onion and ham). JP had a most excellent Veracruz seafood cocktail that was packed with oysters, octopus, scallops and shrimp. The cocktail also contained onion and avocado. The sweet cocktail juice was ultra delicious.
For entrées, I had shrimp empanadas and JP had stuffed squid. My empanadas were filled with shrimp, tomato, onion, cheese, and red pepper. Pretty good overall. The stuffed squid started out with the disadvantage that it was served lukewarm and the cheese on top of the squid had not melted. Also, it looked like the dish's components had been splattered onto the plate. The squid was stuffed with octopus, bell pepper and tomato and cheese. Accompanying the squid was garlic rice. But overall the dish was okay.
Service was very good, but we were a little offput by the mandatory 15% tip that had been tacked onto our bill. Still, we would come back for the crema de langosta soup and Veracruz cocktail. They're worth it! read more