The Nilands have been going from strength to strength. Here’s what they’re doing next
Food superstars Josh and Julie Niland want to reinvent family-friendly dining at Hamilton Island’s luxurious new boutique hotel.
Anyone who has had the pleasure of staying at qualia knows the myriad charms of the five-star, adults-only Whitsundays resort. But for many of the exclusive property’s regular guests, the afterglow of a few days of much-needed adult time, pampering and powering down comes with the strong desire to share the tropical paradise with their children.
Enter The Sundays, the Oatley family’s brand new 59-room hotel overlooking Hamilton Island’s Catseye Beach, designed to redefine how we view luxury and relaxation for families.
The property’s ethos is based on taking everything that makes Sunday the best day of the week and bringing it into the everyday. And key to this family-focused vision is the boutique hotel’s dining experience as overseen by parents-of-four, award-winning chef Josh Niland and his business partner/wife Julie, with input from their in-house “menu consultants” Ted, 10, Lucy, 8, Sophie, 5, and Georgia, 2.
This is, of course, not the Nilands’ first hotel project, having opened their own beautifully appointed rooms above their three-hatted Sydney restaurant Saint Peter in December last year and collaborating with Singapore’s Edition hotel on its Fysh in-house restaurant. But the new Catseye Pool Club’s broad demographic and casual surrounds require an all-day dining approach, which is a different prospect altogether.
“When you’re a 59-room resort and a seven-day operation with breakfast, lunch and dinner, you need to have a slightly more inclusive offering,” begins Josh, talking on his own “lunch break” at Saint Peter.
The collaboration stemmed from the Hamilton Island team’s patronage of Petermen, the couple’s now closed restaurant in St Leonards, on Sydney’s North Shore. However, their intentions were initially unknown to the Nilands.
“They were looking at it through a generous lens of a kid’s menu that they could colour in and the large-format dishes that could be shared between a few that Petermen was special for,” says the chef. “They didn’t know about Saint Peter, so it was nice to carve out an identity with them that wasn’t tied to some of the more unique things that we do,” he laughs.
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While Julie had been to Hamilton Island prior, Josh’s first visit was to create a dining experience in celebration of The Australian Ballet’s return to qualia for its Pas de Deux in Paradise performance in May last year. He returned for Hamilton Island Race Week in August. During these working visits, construction for The Sundays was taking shape overlooking the turquoise arc of Catseye Beach.
“Hamilton Island is one of the most extraordinary destinations in the country so to be a part of something that is iconically Australian – and the second you get there you couldn’t be anywhere else – that’s what made the decision all the simpler for participating,” Josh says.
“It’s definitely a sense of relief having a team,” adds Julie, grateful to be able to leave the pool club’s interior design to Hamilton Island-based Carrie Williams in this instance. “You might think of a great idea and it’s like, ‘OK, well, that doesn’t have to be me who does and designs that or puts it on the website’.”
“While there’s discomfort and constant hard work that always happens within running your own business, Julie and I still independently own and operate Fish Butchery and Saint Peter ourselves,” continues Josh. “And although there are challenges within that, I think there’s professional growth when you start partnering up with other people. You gain a lot of insight from being in the sanctum of another business and you get to have conversations that I don’t believe you would actually have within your own four walls, which only bolsters and aids in bringing greater value to our product here.”
Fuelling growth – both for their businesses and their staff – is always front of mind for the Nilands.
“We love thinking about how we can make it better,” says Julie. “You have to keep growing. You develop so much talent and you’ll lose them if there are no further > opportunities. You can see it happen to a lot of businesses; you train all these people and they’ll either move on to new opportunities or you can work with them on those opportunities.”
With that spirit, the couple has expanded and diversified Niland’s whole-fish ethos for the Catseye Pool Club to include other protein offerings. “I’m a starving butcher, everybody knows that,” Josh laughs, confirming the menu’s inclusion of chicken, beef and lamb alongside his signature seafood. “I think there are so many parallels. We approach fish as meat, and we apply the same theory that a butcher does to an animal to generate more yield. It’s a conversation of both economics and ethics.”
Here he hopes to continue his sustainability message with staff and customers alike.
“It’s educating a new generation of cooks and front-of-house as to how to approach these things. Because I feel like it’s a dying art of convenience where you can now receive packets of fillet meat, chicken or fish. I really want to invest a lot of time and energy in the team so they’ve got skills that take them far and have a greater understanding of Australian produce, as well as just what a whole animal looks like.”
Despite the logistical challenges of adding a tropical island to the couple’s peripatetic work schedule, the entire Niland family is supportive of this new venture. “They are very much on board,” smiles Julie of their children’s reactions upon visiting Hamilton Island.
“For me, personally, Saint Peter is always demanding,” says Josh with a smile. “For nearly 10 years now, it’s been head down, bum up for five to six days a week, and not for a lack of trust within the people that we have, but for the exceedingly high expectations that continue to grow around the product and then probably personal expectations that I have.”
The same conviction has gone into the family-style concept for Catseye Pool Club. “There won’t be fish sausages on the menu and prosciuttos of marlin and all these different things that we’ve developed at Saint Peter because there needs to be a continued reason to celebrate what we do here at Saint Peter. But Julie and I really wanted to make sure the offering on Hamilton is very much family style – and I know that’s probably the most overused sentiment within the culinary world at large now.”
For them, share-style food is all about building out a menu with sides, sauces and garnishes included but served separately to accommodate the needs of children and intergenerational family groups.
“So when you sit down as a table with the kids or different families eating together, then the sauce that goes over it doesn’t actually go anywhere near it because Johnny doesn’t like that,” continues Josh.
“It’s more like how you would serve guests at home,” adds Julie. “The table is full with all the little sides, the garnishes, the salads, the sauce. It’s not so much like the kid’s plates with the [distinct sections], but everything’s separate.”
This approach also means they have high hopes for younger diners being able to transition from the children’s menu to join in with the adults.
“Like the roast chicken that’s on the menu,” says Josh as an example. “It comes without any fuss. Then you get the gravy in a sauce boat, you get roast potatoes, you get a tomato panzanella salad, braised zucchinis, some aioli. Everything’s separate. So again, if Sophie doesn’t want to have the roast potatoes and she only wants to have chicken and sauce, then that’s what she can do,” he says.
“I would like to think that throughout the whole menu of dishes – entrée, mains and desserts – we won’t have to pull out the A5 card of paper that says, ‘Here’s the calamari and chips’. You know what I mean? I would love to see every table at Catseye Pool Club with kids get the beef rib-eye, because they’ll have some chips there, some onion rings, some mushrooms and they’ll have a slice of meat. I’m trying to build the best version of a family dinner at home that you can.”
How is this approach going with their own children’s palates?
“The only thing I can say that shocked me is when you bring home john dory and they wonder why it’s not coral trout,” smiles Josh. “You know when you’ve got to that stage that you’ve got some problems with palates being a little bit more advanced than others. But yeah, it’s fun.”
That said, Niland’s famed fish-isu – a tiramisu dessert that is made using fish bones, fat and eyes – won’t make the dessert menu at Catseye Pool Club. “No, I got told once by one of my kids, ‘Why did you ruin the chocolate ice-cream by putting fish in it?’.” Small steps.
At home in Sydney, Julie does most of the cooking unless they have guests over.Their days start early, with Josh taking their eldest to the bus stop, returning with coffee in tow and they get the younger girls ready. Then Josh goes to Saint Peter, while Julie usually works from home, doing the school pick-ups and kids’ dinner before Josh gets home between 10pm and 11pm.
“Obviously when you own a business, that is of paramount importance to everything to do with our lives,” Josh says. “But there’ll be wonderful moments where we’re able to have Sunday night off and take the kids out for dinner.”
They recently took their children to Neil Perry’s Margaret restaurant in Sydney’s Double Bay. “We all just had a really lovely dinner and walking to the car and seeing bats in the sky and the kids thinking that was super amazing; you realise it’s not that they don’t get to see loads, but it’s more that when you go and do those fun things, they see things that you forget are a novelty to the eye of a child.
“If you’re able to create some core memory-burning experiences with the kids, then come 19, 20, they’ll be like, ‘Mum and Dad used to take us there and it was really delicious’, and ‘The first time I ever had this, it was with this person on this beach’.
I think those powerful memories need to be there. That needs to be foundational to a child’s upbringing. So that’s our motivation at large for Hamilton Island. We want to create extraordinary memories for families and for kids.”
Read the full recipe for chef Josh Niland's snapper baked in salt crust pastry.
This story is from the May issue of WISH.
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