FIN TO FIN
Sydney chef Josh Niland has taken seafood into uncharted waters – from dry-aged fillets to fish bacon and fish-eye chips. His new book aims to help us buy, store and cook kaimoana better and use the whole fish, scale to tail.
When he was barely a teenager, recovering from childhood cancer, Josh Niland started cooking dinner for his parents and sister. Nothing fancy, he says, but he loved how “a couple of hours of peeling and chopping and looking after something on the stove translated into everybody having a great time … It wasn’t like I was going, ‘I want to be a chef.’”
By the age of 15, he’d convinced his parents to let him leave school for an apprenticeship, and another 15 years on, what chef Niland is doing with fish is up there with what Spain’s Ferran Adrià did for foam at El Bulli in the 1990s. At Saint Peter, his restaurant in Sydney’s Paddington, Niland serves up fish-eye chips, dry-aged Murray cod, sea urchin crumpets and tuna steaks frenched to look like a crown roast. A few doors up at his
