26 MAY 2019
OBSESSIONS
to go by, customers are digging his approach
to making secondary fish cuts palatable. “It’s
kind of cool that offal now is exceeding the
desirability of the fillet because that was
always my intention,” he says.
That intention was inspired in part dur-
ing his formative years as a chef. When he
started working in professional high-end
kitchens in Sydney at the age of 16, many
of them championed using the whole beast,
and he found himself building his skills
around that culinary philosophy. Those
early years were followed by a four-month
assignment in the U.K. as a stagiaire at
Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, where
he predominantly worked on the chef’s
cookbook Heston Blumenthal at Home.
While stationed near London, Niland and
his wife, Julie, a pastry chef, found them-
selves frequently eating at Fergus Hender-
son’s nose-to-tail temple, St. John.
Despite the extreme juxtaposition in
style (Blumenthal’s Willy Wonka–esque
molecular gastronomy versus Henderson’s
offal-centric celebration of humble British
bistro fare) what each chef was doing in
his respective restaurant utterly resonated
with Niland: “I went overseas to try and find
some clarity in terms of direction and style of food that I was
going to aspire to personally.” And he had found it.
When he returned home, he worked at one of Sydney’s
most highly regarded seafood restaurants, Fish Face, under
the mentorship of chef-owner Steve Hodges, where he began
to experiment with fish offal. It’s here that the seed was planted
for a new method of storing, preparing, and treating fish that
Niland uses today—and that’s quite unlike anything else in the
Western world.
At Saint Peter, Niland hangs and dry-ages fish in custom-
built cool rooms. The fish never come into
contact with any water, ice, salt, or brine of
any kind. When he first started doing this,
the industry thought he was nuts. “People
really kicked up a fuss when I opened Saint
Peter because I posted a photo of myself on
Instagram hanging a fish on a meat hook,
and they said I was an idiot,” he says.
But here’s Niland’s logic: A wet fish is
a bad fish. Any moisture on a fish once it
leaves the ice slurry that holds it right
after it’s killed is slowly breaking down
the flesh and shortening its shelf life.
Water can work its way into the muscle
or get trapped in the pockets where the
scales used to be, speeding up degenera-
tion. (This is why the common practice
of washing fish under running water or
displaying it on ice actually makes no
sense, according to the chef.) By hanging
fish in 0°C to -2°C static refrigeration, he
can get up to 12 days more shelf life out of
his most precious commodity—and with
certain fish, like albacore tuna, three times
that long. Most fish in restaurants have
just a few days of storage in them before
they spoil. It all goes back to the waste-not,
want-not business model: “I think for a
fish restaurant or a fish shop, the need for
dry-aging the way I do it—and the use of
fish offal—is an absolute necessity.”
Since Saint Peter opened in 2016, that
approach has been so successful it has
allowed Niland to open a second location
a few doors up. Fish Butchery is a retail
space that carries up to 25 underutilized
Australian fish species per day and is also
an extension of the dry-aging facility that
supplies both the restaurant and the store.
Niland’s approach to dry aging—once the domain of meat-
centric cooking—also extends to a playful rendering of fish as
meat. The menu at Saint Peter is full of fish “chops,” “racks,”
“ribs,” and even broadbill (swordfish) “steak frites.” (Fish Butch-
ery also carries a selection of fish “charcuterie”—think spearfish
pastrami, wild cobia pancetta, and coral trout head terrine.)
Niland believes these allusions to more familiar cuts of beef,
lamb, and chicken offer a point of reference and make seafood
more approachable. “Fish is met with so much confrontation,”
he says. “I can confidently say that cooking
fish kind of scares the shit out of people.”
For those who can’t make it to Sydney,
you can still get a unique insight into the
chef’s world through social media (user-
name @mrniland on Instagram; 65,000 fol-
lowers and counting), where he captures his
endeavors, sometimes visceral, other times
cheeky, but always beautiful and restrained,
just like his cooking.
from top: Josh Niland;
red gurnard, one of the
many bycatch species
on offer at Saint Peter;
Yamba sardines with
olive oil and lemon.
“It’s kind of cool that
offal now is exceed-
ing the desirability
of the fillet because
that was always my
intention.” PHOTOGRAPHY (FROM TOP): NIKKI TO, JOSH NILAND, MATTHEW ABBOTT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
