Michael Tassis remembers picking up the phone at six in the morning.

“I was buying seafood for my dad’s restaurant [George’s Paragon] in Sanctuary Cove,” he says.

“It was a different game back then. The boats would go out a lot more frequently, so the whole equation of getting fresh produce was different.

“I was maybe 15 or 16 years old. It was an eye-opener. I appreciated the experience my dad [George Tassis] gave me, you had to be smart. It was a family business, but it was almost like a university.”

Those phone calls were the beginning of a close relationship between Tassis and the local seafood industry – one that grew tighter as he opened his own George’s Paragon at Eagle Street Pier in 2010 and then, starting in 2019, a sequence of other venues: Rico Bar & Dining, Massimo Restaurant & Bar, Fatcow Steak & Lobster, Opa Bar & Mezze, and Yamas Greek & Drink.

You wonder, then, why it took Tassis so long to open Fosh, his first dedicated seafood restaurant, which was unveiled at Portside Wharf in mid-August.

“I wanted to be in a place where I could do something a bit different,” he says. “That’s why we have the dry-ageing component, for example. We can age anywhere from three or four days to 30 days with our fish. I wanted that space to be able to work with the chefs and create something out of the ordinary.”

Tassis says it’s the same with Fosh Tails, Fosh’s modern take on a fish and chip shop, which sits in its own tenancy at one end of the restaurant.

Along with your typical fish and chips, it serves upscale items such as ocean trout and tuna bowls, half-shell scallops with kombu butter, and a fancy fish sando.

“We try to do a modern take on fish and chips,” Tassis says. “Something you can eat three or four times a week.”

The twin eateries are a step change for Portside Wharf at Hamilton, and part of a new wave of venues – along with Rise Bakery and a new outlet for Bird’s Nest, Emi Kamada and Marie Yokoyama’s hugely popular yakitori restaurant – that are opening as part of a $20 million makeover of the precinct.

“The vision, if everything goes through, will be amazing,” Tassis says. “Since we opened, there are a lot of good operators looking at going in there.”

You can understand why.

In an era of flash fitouts, Fosh is a proper head-turner, regular Tassis collaborators Clui Design taking their usual approach to his restaurants – low-set booths, arched features, plush fabrics, and elegant tiling – and applying it to a spacious tenancy with high ceilings.

A seat inside lands you in a warmly detailed dining room that gets you close to the dry-ageing fridge and raw section. But the light-filled covered terrace out the front is where you want to be, closer to the river and the theatre of the live-seafood tank. It’s a lovely place to while away a couple of hours over lunch or dinner.

The menu by chef Vikash Gurung (formerly Greca, Jellyfish, and Tassis’ Fatcow and Rico restaurants) is simple and relatively tight.

For starters, there’s Fremantle octopus with smoked baba ghanoush, pine nuts and curry leaf; Hokkaido scallops with grilled kombu butter and spring onion; barbecued squid in a green salsa with peas and marinated pepper.

From the raw section, you can order oysters, scallop or tuna crudo, and cured ocean trout. There are also caviar bumps served with a shot of vodka, or a glass of Moet & Chandon.

On a market seafood menu, there’s coral trout with prawn XO sauce and charred spring onion; baked whole sole with lemon, capers, butter and charred herbs; barbecued toothfish with miso butter; and one-kilogram servings of black mussels with white wine, garlic, confit tomato and parsley.

Moreton Bay bugs come one of two ways – barbecued with cognac, Worcestershire sauce, lemon butter sauce, and a choice of two sides, or served in spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, white wine and kefalograviera (an intense, hard Greek-style cheese).

From the tank you can order southern rock lobster or Queensland mud crab by weight. The lobster is either roasted in kombu butter or grilled in lemon butter; the crab baked in lemon caper butter or served Singapore chilli-crab style.

For friends who don’t eat seafood, there’s a short menu of large plates that includes smoked eggplant with almond skordalia, fried shallots and herbs; twice-cooked chicken by the whole or half bird; and a 400-gram three-score Black Onyx rib fillet.

The food is matched to a 130-bottle wine list that favours approachable Australian drops, although you can range up to a $750 Pol Roger Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill or an $850 Jim Barry The Armagh Museum Release shiraz if you’re feeling giddy.

Otherwise, there are classic and signature cocktails, and a pair of cocktail jugs with one built on limoncello, the other vodka.

“The first weeks were a little crazy [busy],” Tassis says. “It’s just a combination of things. One, people do know me for seafood from my other restaurants.

“But I think this area has been dying for something like this. There are great restaurants around there, but nothing quite like Fosh.”

Open daily 11am-late.

39 Hercules Street, Hamilton, (07) 3211 8111.

foshportside.com.au