Australian seafood - our palate is too limited, and seafood restaurants are too few
Australians don’t eat as much, or as many types, of fish as they think. There is so much more to seafood.
I’m sitting waterside, supping a dozen oysters of three varietals from six regions and sipping a glass of white wine as the warm summer sun smiles on the water’s surface.
Life is pretty damn good. As fishing boats bob and sway over the glistening blue, things get even better when my main — a piece of fresh local fish simply grilled nude, but for a garnish of lemon and slap of molten butter — arrives.
Serving fresh, local and seasonal seafood by the water, surely this place qualifies as a great Australian seafood restaurant?
But this is a daggy, off-the-radar kind of place for the fastidious food critic and hipster consumer. My table is old and worn. The menu has starters and mains, not shared plates. And the marine-quaint setting is being bombarded by seagulls fearless in their mission to steal chips or shoot missiles on your meal.
The point is, I’m sitting at a table at one of Sydney’s highest-volume tourist destinations and coincidentally the location of my office, the Sydney Fish Market.
While the total offer might not pass muster in the groovy food postcodes of Surry Hills or Fitzroy, the tens of thousands of visitors who make a pilgrimage here every month in search of a great seafood experience seem pretty happy (for the record, the market draws more than 2.7 million visitors a year).
So when the question is posed — “Where are Australia’s great seafood restaurants?” — it becomes a deliberation of chicken-or-egg proportions. For a nation girt by sea, with such a wealth of premium seafood, it’s a reasonable question, and one that is often asked by visitors to our shores.
But what’s the benchmark for a great seafood restaurant?
Is it the rock star-filled Scotts in London’s Mayfair, complete with the £200 ($407) plateau de fruits de mer with a side of Kate Moss? The Mario Batali-backed Esca in mid-town Manhattan where fisherman Dave Pasternack redefines simplicity in seafood, or perhaps one of the mighty pleasure domes of Paris such as La Coupole, where a tsunami of oysters is shucked and slurped by the most beautiful people on earth, daily? Maybe the great seafood restaurant experience is more likely found in the quaint neighbourhood seafood bistros such as Bistro du Dome in Paris’s Montparnasse, the amazing Al Gatto Nero on the island of Burano in Venice, or is the absolute definition of a great seafood restaurant a high temple of gastronomy such as the insanely superb Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo?
Or is the true essence of a great seafood experience in fact the humble waterside seafood joints that are as much about place as plate, often open only for short periods of time — days or weeks when a species is in season. Perhaps one of the hundreds of lean-to crab shacks that line the Chesapeake Bay on the east coast of the US, the mussel bars of La Rochelle in western France, or the roadside wok-wielding chilli crab vendors of southern Thailand?
According to Anthony Huckstep, co-author (with myself) of a forthcoming guidebook on Australian seafood, and national restaurant critic for delicious magazine, beyond the bounds of a handful of species, consumers don’t really know what to do with our treasures of the deep.
“They’re intimidated because everything is wet, slimy and scaly,” he says. “Many chefs are the same. We might be surrounded by sea, but culturally we barely skim the surface in regards to education on seafood cooking. And what that means is we end up eating less seafood than we think we do.”
The facts are stark. In comparison with chicken, beef, lamb and pork, our consumption of seafood is meagre: a paltry 16.5kg of seafood per capita per annum in comparison with 218kg of red protein and nearly 50kg of chicken.
Chicken, beef and pork have become the ubiquitous proteins of our era. By comparison with seafood they are generally mild in taste and uniform in texture, presenting a blank canvas for almost any cuisine’s flavour spectrum.
I asked a few mates who have seafood-centric restaurants why a seafood-only restaurant is so difficult to execute. They all agree that a seafood restaurant demands extraordinary commitment.
Mitch Tonks, whose four Rockfish restaurants and fine diner Seahorse are all located quayside in towns along the southwest coast of England, regards proximity to the source non-negotiable. “A great seafood restaurant is one that serves fish which has minimal time between water and plate,” he says. “In running a seafood restaurant it’s all about trust. We trust the fishermen to get us great seafood, whatever the species, and our customers must trust us to serve them something delicious, even if they aren’t familiar with the species.”
He’s right. I can still recall the wonder of a piece of wood-roasted sand dab I ate at Seahorse over a year ago, even though I’d never seen this fish before.
Like it or not, the fact is most Australians prefer skinless, boneless white or orange fleshed fish over most other seafood. Could this be the limiting factor?
Whether it’s due to squeamishness or supermarket convenience, Australia’s seafood supplies remain under-utilised. The 50 per cent of us who do eat fish weekly are wedded to fillets of firm favourites. Elsewhere in the world, not only is a broader range of species revered but every part of the animal becomes a potential meal, resulting in far lower food wastage and endless culinary possibilities.
Los Angeles-based star chef Michael Cimarusti runs Providence, one of the most refined seafood restaurants in the US, and believes he has a responsibility to educate and inform diners as much as feed them.
“People like me are seen as only choosing to serve things like fish offal or unknown species as a shock tactic, but I like to give the customer a bit more credit than that,” he says.
Based on his belief that the global exchange of information is encouraging people to widen their horizons, Cimarusti regards a global sourcing policy as imperative. “Of course I love local Californian seafood, but here in the US we are a 90 per cent net importer of seafood and for me it’s a matter of looking elsewhere to get what I need,” he says. “I use John Dory from New Zealand, simply because it is the best I can get and the liver is amazing.”
With Australia a 75 per cent net importer of seafood, it’s a moot point. Seafood restaurant godfather Rick Stein agrees with Tonks that proximity to water is imperative, but also feels there is some onus on customers. “The greatest challenge is selling everything as quickly as possible,” he says. “The reason so many people don’t rate fish highly is because they’re used to eating it when it’s not at its freshest and whether it is cause or effect, many people simply won’t pay the price for the best.”
Huckstep wonders whether it is in fact price-prohibitive for operators to offer a truly great dedicated seafood restaurant. “I’m not convinced consumers are willing to pay,” he says. “We have some of the world’s most incredible seafood in our waters, but the ethical and sustainable practices we undertake here come at a cost to everyone in the food chain.”
But Huckstep is not convinced our food culture expects seafood-centric restaurants any more anyway. “How many great steakhouses do we have — a handful? I don’t think steakhouses are something we expect any more, so why are we pointing the finger at seafood restaurants? I tend to think we now expect restaurants and chefs to source the best product and cook it to its optimum. Whether it’s fish, beef or chicken.”
Certainly, the best seafood dish I ate last year in Australia was in a steakhouse at a casino, miles from the water. (For the record, it was a piece of pearl perch at Rockpool B & G, Perth.)
As someone who has sold fish to restaurants for the past 30 years, I am convinced that the quality, variety and value of seafood being offered to chefs have never been greater. The craft skills of the chefs preparing seafood in Australia too have never been better.
So perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. Maybe, instead of searching for the elusive Great Australian Seafood Restaurant, we should all be asking ourselves: Why aren’t we eating more fish? And when was the last time you ate a fish you’d never tried before?
Best seafood restaurants:
NSW: Sepia, Sydney. The Boathouse at Blackwattle Bay, Sydney. Firedoor, Sydney. Fins, Kingscliff. Bondi’s Best, Sydney. Rick Stein at Bannisters, Mollymook. Sokyo, Sydney. Rockpool, Sydney. Cafe Nice, Sydney. North Bondi Fish, Sydney
Victoria: Bacash, Melbourne. Minamishima, Melbourne
Western Australia: Halo, Perth
South Australia: Jolley’s Boathouse, Adelaide
Queensland: Fish House, Burleigh Heads. Jellyfish, Brisbane
John Susman and Anthony Huckstep are co-authors of a guidebook to Australian seafood, to be published by Murdoch Books this year.