Fish tacos, turtle nachos, shrimp stir-fry and stew conch pizza were just some of the delights on offer at last weekend’s Live Seafood Festival 2025.
Hundreds of visitors who had paid around $45-$60 for a ticket – VIP tickets were also available – flocked to the festival last Saturday afternoon held next to Public Beach in front of Hotel Indigo to sample the variety of seafood on offer.
Restaurants including Nourish at Vida, Cayman Cabana and D’s Pizza served up local delicacies alongside private chefs and local catering companies to make sure that no one was likely to leave hungry.
Event organiser Ricardo Morris told the Compass that the event, now in its fourth year, had gone “very well – we had the best turnout we’ve ever had.”
He estimated that over 700 people attended the event. “We wanted to provide an authentic experience showing off the seafood and heritage of the Cayman Islands and it was great to see so many newcomers as well as repeat visitors to the festival.”
Live Seafood Festival is one of the highlights of Cayman’s culinary scene along with other events such as the Live Street Food Festival and Cayman Cookout, but was very different in feel to either.
“It’s a unique event, with the focus on seafood,” said Britta Bush from Saucha, the plant-based organic food pantry. “We’ve been around for 12 years but this is our first time here. Compared with Cayman Cookout, which is a really amazing, high-end event, this also has a food theme but feels more accessible to locals.”
Bush was serving up sourdough bread with hummus, tzatziki, black trumpet mushrooms, red kraut and locally-foraged flowers. Her nod to seafood was her green popcorn, seasoned with spirulina blue green algae, “so that’s our food from the sea”.
Private chef Thomas Tennant was making a coconut seafood rundown with green plantain mashed with garlic and butter, and a Puerto Rican hot sauce. Simultaneously dealing with the heat of the day and the heat from his cooking, Tennant nonetheless said he was enjoying being back at a Cayman food festival, having spent some time travelling around working on other projects.
Another popular stall run by a private chef was that of chef Roman Kleinrath of Roman Private Chef Services, who was stirring a vast dish of Spanish paella, a seafood rice creation with shrimp, chicken, chorizo, sausage, mussels and clams, while one of the longest queues was at Smokies, where chef Jamal Miller was busy assembling local breadfruit, Korean-fried chicken and Louisiana-inspired turtle etufee nachos.
Next to the VIP section, which offered extra shade and seating, farm-to-fork restaurant Nourish was serving up a saltfish and ackee empanada with a tamarind chutney and pickled cabbage.
“We’ve been part of it since the beginning,” said chef Maureen Cubbon. “The organisers are close friends, and they have a real great passion about doing great festivals around food and what we have here culturally.”
As well as the variety of food on offer, there were several stalls selling locally-made jewellery, hats and baskets, with gelato and cold drinks on sale to provide relief from the blazing sunshine. With live music continuing well into the night, the food festival soon took on a party atmosphere and will no doubt return this time next year to showcase more of Cayman’s food from the sea.
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