Changing tide: What Saint Peter chef Josh Niland did next

Saint Peter chef Josh Niland takes a moment to reflect as he launches his new cookbook and the fish shop equivalent of a charcoal chicken joint.

Josh Niland believes all restaurants need to apocalypse-proof themselves.

Having spent the past 18 months ducking and weaving with his flagship fine diner Saint Peter and retail/takeaway store Fish Butchery, he's learned enough to disaster-proof his next venue. And he thinks every restaurant in Australia, new and existing, needs to consider doing the same. If other restaurateurs aren't thinking along similar lines, he says, "they need to."

Niland is no stranger to breaking the mould. He introduced the fine dining world to fish blood boudin noir, made monkfish liver sexy and served mirror dory eyeball crackers when he opened his first restaurant back in 2017.

He was one of the first to pivot to an online takeaway service when lockdown hit in 2020, rallying out-of-work chefs across Sydney to collaborate on menus. And now he's set to open a hybrid restaurant specifically designed to withstand lockdowns, serving fish that tastes like barbecue chicken, with the texture of pork.

With any luck and the eventual easing of construction restrictions, Charcoal Fish will open in Rose Bay in August. And that crazy-sounding fish Niland's so excited about? That's Aquna Murray cod, a sustainable fish farmed in Griffith, which will be cooked over wood-fire and served with Ottolenghi-style salads.

I didn't like the restaurant I was standing in, and we decided to pull it apart.

Josh Niland

"It's the restaurant I think more people wish existed," says Niland. "And I'm hoping it becomes like the suburban chicken shop on every street corner."

Charcoal Fish heralds a change in the way Niland thinks restaurants should pitch themselves.

Here he lets go of the traditional restaurant business model of minimal kitchen and maximal dining space (the accepted thinking has been that bums on seats = minimal debt and maximum earnings). Instead, he and wife/business partner Julie Niland have designed a space that's mainly taken up by the kitchen, with tables and chairs that can easily be installed and removed, depending on government restrictions.

"It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody if we continue to be in lockdown for the next few months we've got the opportunity to make adjustments to our restaurants, even if that's creating more of a generous space for your kitchen."

More generous space in the Charcoal Fish kitchen means that at the flick of a switch he can change the restaurant to do higher volume takeaway business with very little disturbance behind the scenes. All by clever architecture and a keen understanding that this virus just isn't going away in a hurry.

At 32, Josh Niland is what the casual observer would describe as a heavy hitter: a high achiever with a healthy appetite for success. In 2017, his seafood-centric restaurant Saint Peter took home the Good Food Guide Award for New Restaurant of the Year, along with two chef hats. The restaurant, with its sparse decor and pioneering attitude to fish cookery, had chefs around the world sitting up and paying attention.

Time and again he pushed ideas on diners that in lesser hands were, well, kind of gross. But he'd worked with the best. The serious young chef from Maitland cut his teeth with Peter Doyle at Est. and Steve Hodges at Fish Face.

Courage in his convictions saw him develop a reputation for "scale to tail" fish cookery in a way no other chef anywhere was doing, using every part of the fish from eyeball to heart, cheek to swim bladder. He was taking dry-ageing seafood to new heights. He had chefs from around the world lining up to learn fish preparation from him.

And the hits just kept coming.

Fish Butchery, the country's first dedicated high-end seafood store specialising in dry-aged, cut-to-order fish and offal, swung open in 2018. In 2020, American culinary awards association James Beard Foundation awarded Niland's first written work, The Whole Fish Cookbook, book of the year.

Japanese clothing designer Junya Watanabe took the cover of that cookbook and printed it on a T-shirt (purchase yours for a cool $267 from high-end digital boutique My Theresa).

In 2019, the restaurant had grown from the modest, idiosyncratic fish place the Nilands had originally envisioned to a restaurant burdened by the weight of its own huge reputation. And it was becoming increasingly challenging for kitchen staff to deliver Niland's vision.

He was used to cooking every meal with the help of a young kitchen team. He wasn't used to delegating. "[The menu] came out of my hands and my head and onto a plate and then onto your table. Seeing that kind of immediacy, feedback and contact was what I had always craved," says Niland.

That year, he lost his second Good Food Guide chef's hat. It was a significant blow for a chef who'd consistently landed every punch since opening. He was juggling life at home with a young family and in his kitchen – the bank of Josh Niland was officially overdrawn.

"It had just gotten to a point where I didn't know what I was there for. I felt completely unfulfilled in both departments, like I wasn't giving enough on either side of the fence. And when that [dropping from two chefs hats to one] happened it became, 'Well, what the f--- are you doing?' "

A few months later, the first lockdown hit. It was the breather Niland needed to recalibrate. "We shut the restaurant on March 21, my mum's birthday. I remember prepping in the restaurant alone one day and I just asked myself how happy I was professionally, separate to COVID-19. I was super miserable. I didn't like the restaurant I was standing in, and we decided to pull it apart."

For the Nilands, the 2020 lockdown was a time of regeneration and renewal. When they weren't working on the new-look restaurant, they were pouring their energy into Mr Niland At Home – take-home meals from Saint Peter and the Fish Butchery that morphed into a collaboration project between them and displaced chefs such as Nik Hill (Porcine), Mitch Orr, Tama Carey (Lankan Filling Station) and Sean Moran (Sean's Panaroma and High Hopes). It was a breakout success.

Saint Peter stands today waiting to welcome back guests with the same ethos it's always had sign-posted above the door: an Australian fish eatery. But it's a little less focused on how far a menu can be pushed in terms of no-waste fish cookery and more about enjoyment for the diner.

There are 18 dining spots lined down a long chef's table so everyone gets a ringside seat. Serious young chefs are on hand to tell their diners how long it's been since their sardines were plucked out of the water (potentially as early as that very morning) and fish eyeball crackers and livers on toast have been replaced with thickly buttered sourdough and gently pickled King George whiting.

It's those changes, too, that are reflected in his new cookbook, Take One Fish, on shelves July 28, where the emphasis is still on scale-to-tail but also on comfort and ease of use.

"I've gone from being feeling fairly austere and quite clinical to now just concentrating on making my food really delicious. There's a bit less 'look at me, look at me, look at me'. It's just a maturity thing."

What did Josh do next? He kept swimming.

Take One Fish by Josh Niland, published by Hardie Grant Books, RRP $55, available in stores nationally. Photography: Rob Palmer. Buy now