Trailblazing chef Josh Niland is only just getting started
His bright ideas about seafood have changed the way we eat, but when it comes to innovation, there’s no limit in sight.
Leaning over a table bearing a gleaming red fish known as an alfonsino, culinary mastermind Josh Niland stares intently down the lens of the Vogue Australia camera, appearing entirely in his element.
Once the photo shoot wraps, Niland packs the fish into a styrofoam box delivered directly from his very own seafood store, Sydney’s Fish Butchery, a partner establishment to his award-winning Paddington restaurant Saint Peter. It’s only now he shares that although he looked very much at ease on set, the studio proved an unfamiliar environment for him. But the set up? That was a familiar one for the chef.
“What makes me tick is standing in a room by myself, staring at fish and achieving an outcome that I didn’t get last time,” Niland says, a thoughtful expression colouring his boyish features. “Even this morning before I came here, I stood in the butchery, put a fish on the bench and stared at it.”
For Niland, who is renowned for his innovation, observation proves the most effective catalyst for inspiration in the kitchen. “It sounds strange, but every time I go to cut a fish, I don’t know exactly how it’s going to end up,” he admits. The final product, in Niland’s hands, could be anything from a yellowfin tuna cheeseburger to his famed fish-eye ice-cream.
“I’ll look at it and based on its size, shape and general dimensions, I’ll make the decision as to how it’ll end up being for you when you come and eat. It’s a fairly abstract approach, and it’s one that is contingent on being in the room,” he continues. “But we’re training people to think in a similar way.”
At just 35, Niland has become the face of a philosophy known as whole fish cookery. Pioneering the fin-to-gill movement, the celebrated chef and Audi Australia ambassador has established a culinary empire made up of acclaimed restaurants and retail concepts. In 2020, he became the first Australian to win the prestigious James Beard award — sometimes referred to as the Oscars of food — for his debut tome, The Whole Fish Cookbook. His third book, Fish Butchery, was released in August.
But Niland’s transformation of the way the world cooks, stores, ages and views fish was not born of a desire for global acclaim. Nor was it an effort to advance ethical and sustainable standards, although both proved by-products. Instead, his ingenuity was inspired by a sense of fear and financial factors.
“I received my first invoice for fish and it cost a fortune,” the chef remembers of the moment he and his wife Julie opened Saint Peter in Sydney’s Paddington in 2016. “And there’s the chef part of your brain which is saying that half of what you’ve just purchased is going to go in the bin, because there’s not a lot to do with everything else that comes from a fish. We were super-busy when we opened, so there wasn’t the mindset to use the whole fish in the beginning.”
Six months later, alarm bells rang as the restaurant’s guest flow began to taper. “We weren’t as full, which I think is the natural trajectory of most restaurants. But I had doubled the staff assuming we’d continue being busy, because I was exhausted and wasn’t seeing my family. So the wage costs blew out, and the food costs remained unchanged.”
Following a conversation with his accountant, Niland was forced to figure out how to streamline spending. “The way I approached it was by putting trays on top of garbage bins,” he explains. “That meant we would start catching what we thought was waste and packing it away. Then, we’d pull it out and try to interpret what it looked like.”
Mastering how to make these unappealing parts of the fish delicious proved Niland’s next challenge. “There were already ideas in my head around trying to interpret fish more like meat, but it became very literal. It was then looking at the world of meat butchery and trying to push that into the world of fish,” says the chef. “By doing that, we started getting very expansive in our innovation. Economically, it became what made Saint Peter viable.
“There have been times we’ve had to reach out to different creatives to help bring reality to some parts of the fish, like working with a chap down in Victoria to make ceramics out of the bones and fat turned into candles and soaps. Not always does the by-product of a fish have to end up on the plate, it can actually be the plate,” smiles Niland. “So that’s kind of fun.”
In the months that followed, the recognition Saint Peter received for its creative efforts cemented Niland’s approach to whole-fish cookery. “That helped carve out the lane we saw ourselves in,” he says. “Then we really leaned into that, and that’s been the trajectory of the past seven years.”
As Jeff Mannering, director of Audi Australia, explains: “Josh is nothing short of spectacular when it comes to challenging the status quo, creating new and inventive ways to minimise food wastage – without compromise. His dedication to sustainability and innovation in his field is synonymous with our approach to progress here at Audi, and we are always overjoyed to share a little bit of Josh’s magic with like-minded Audi owners.”
Those seven years have seen Niland and his wife expand their burgeoning culinary empire across Sydney, with two outposts of the Fish Butchery, as well as the wildly popular and more casual Charcoal Fish, and Petermen located north of the bridge in St Leonards. There’s also been the release of his three books.
“What makes me tick is standing in a room by myself, staring at fish and achieving an outcome that I didn’t get last time”
Next, the power couple plan to open their first hotel in the summer of 2024. This location, which will take over Paddington’s Grand National Hotel, will also rehouse a new and improved Saint Peter.
“We opened Petermen because there were delays with the Grand National Hotel,” says Niland of an experience that proved something of a culinary boot camp and training ground.
“We had the infrastructure, the people, the fish and the tenacity to do it,” he adds. “I was nervous about going into the hotel with an underbaked group of people needing to execute something so grand. Learning how to be more than a chef made me very uncomfortable, but I’m glad we did it. We’re putting a lot of effort into making it feel quite extraordinary, and it’s almost there.”
Each location serves as a reflection of Niland’s own welcoming nature. “In our venues, I don’t think you ever smell fish. You don’t feel cold or have wet feet. Those things play into a nostalgic belief that a fish shop is the worst place in the world. So [I want] to create warmth and transparency. I need people to come in and feel as if they can see everything, that’s why there are no walls.”
Mannering affirms Niland’s commitment to innovation across all aspects of his venues. “For those lucky enough to cross paths with Josh or dine at his table, this manifests in the clear reverence and care for each element of his dishes, as well as the transparency of both provenance and supplier throughout his menus,” he says.
It’s this attention to detail that drew Niland to working with fish as a young chef learning from Fish Face’s Steve Hodges. Not — as one might think — because of a love of fishing. “I’m not a fisherman and I don’t like fishing. That’s on record,” he laughs. In fact, the last time the chef found himself at sea was when he set out to capture an image for Fish Butchery. “I got made fun of because of how much I didn’t want to be out there, and I was so physically unwell,” he recalls.
“Luckily, we caught the kingfish we needed and we’ve got a wonderful drone shot in the book.”
Niland has come a long way from the chef who, by his own admission, refused to let anybody else cook for the first three years of Saint Peter. “That’s not a good way to run a kitchen by any means, because it’s restrictive and limiting and exhausting.” Now Niland views his role as one of a mentor, something that allows him time with his family of four children. He’s gone from “being the guy who cooks everything” to being more of a coach. “One that tries to get around to all of our venues throughout the week and hopefully mentor and give good advice,” he sums up.
This article appears in the October issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.