Get out your shades. It’s not the sun that’s punishing at this Mexican coastal seafood joint, it’s the fluorescents; CP is nothing if not bright. The canciones churned out of a splashy jukebox can also be punishing, but leave the earplugs at home; this is part of the tacky charm of a place that serves seafood cocktails worthy of much snazzier places. We’d hold off on “La Ballena” (The Whale)—32 ounces of every imaginable denizen of the deep—but we are hooked on the campechana with fish, shrimp, octopus, and more.

Soups such as “Siete Mares” and “Levanta Muertos” (raise the dead) are filled to the gunwales with seafood and helpfully double as hangover cures, but pass on the fried stuff, please. Though expensive in context, the camarones aguachile, shrimp “cooked” (marinated, really) in lemon juice with fresh jalapeño, is a coastal classic—and the antithesis of fried. On the (relatively) pricey side is the pescado sarandeado, a specialty of Mexican beach towns; cooked in foil with a host of spicy cohorts, this whole fish is frankly, and busily, baroque. But Manhattan’s Le Bernardin CP is not, nor would we want it to be. You can do pristine pescado somewhere else. Come here for supremely authentic south-of-the-border sea creatures, in all their humble glory.