Seafood
''I CAN laugh about it now,'' Jonathan Rowe says but he still sounds a little raw. Fair enough - it was only two months ago that Fish in a Flash had an all-out power failure on its opening night.
About 40 people were waiting on orders when - bam! - the fryers stopped bubbling, the rangehoods stopped extracting and oily vapours flooded the room.
''We couldn't even open the till to give people refunds,'' says Rowe, who raced to the nearest ATM to gather some cash. He was mortified, so disappointed with the inauspicious start to his business, but the punters returned, many with the same ticket stubs from opening night.
Paul Rowe, Jonathan's dad, opened Echuca's Fish in a Flash in 1989. He turns 70 in July and still works there seven days a week. As a teen, Jonathan did time behind the fryer, as did his brother and sisters, returning every Easter to help out.
''It's like our pilgrimage,'' Rowe says. ''Everyone would end up in Echuca and work in the fish shop. This is the first year it's not going to happen and my mother's dirty on me.''
The metropolitan Fish in a Flash is an evolution of the country concept. Jonathan's interior designer sister, Beatrix, is responsible for the handsome fit-out, the walls a ''pale Icelandic'' greenish-blue with an arty red fish embedded in the floor.
A long mirror makes the already open space seem bigger, reflecting a few of the family-sized blond-wood tables, and the kitchen layout is based on the Echuca shop, honed for maximum efficiency.
Consistency is a major focus. The Bentleigh East shop uses computerised cookers that keep the rice-bran oil at a constant 180 degrees, no matter how busy the fryer.
It produces a light and golden batter, the product of 20 years of tweaking, that's billed as ''beer batter'', although there's no beer in it. Jonathan says it has a similar finish. Beer or not, it's hot and crisp around the sweet flesh of a King George whiting cooked just right, or as a crunchy casing for a fillet of redfin, a river fish that can shrink on the grill. The barramundi is cut big for grilling, there's gummy shark (flake), of course, and fish-of-the-day in the bumper-value meal packs. My calamari rings and prawns were a touch overdone but tasty nonetheless.
The chips - long and golden with a clean snap - are a centimetre thick, McCain, frozen and cooked in sync with the fish so it all comes out hot together.
Fish in a Flash is a solid, simple operation. It doesn't do burgers or milkshakes - just fish, chips and the trimmings such as pickled onions and house-made potato cakes.
And if you need inspiration to pack the Esky and head north, pictures of fishermen clutching the famed Murray cod are displayed on the front window. It's a beaut addition to the neighbourhood, hook, line and sinker.
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