Niland’s secret ingredient
Australian called ‘one of the most interesting chefs on the planet’
At the heart — and the liver, intestines and eyeballs — of chef Josh Niland’s venture into “use everything” fish cuisine was his restaurant’s survival.
But since beginning to experiment with these normally discarded offcuts, Niland has emerged as a fish alchemist, a culinary wizard who turns fish bits into edible gold and is, according to celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, “one of the most interesting chefs on the planet right now”.
Fish milt mortadella, pasta made of intestines and even eyeball ice cream are some of the dishes Niland has created ever since he received that call from his accountant warning him the overheads at Saint Peter, his then six-month-old Sydney restaurant, were too high.
“My accountant gets on the phone and says, ‘What are you going to do about it, because you’re not going to last the rest of the year running it like this,’” Niland tells Australian Story.
Niland didn’t want to lose staff so he turned to the fish. He knew that up to 50 per cent of whole fish ended up as waste. For a high-end restaurant such as Saint Peter, where Niland’s weekly fish invoice was AU$4500 (FJ$6701.11), that’s a lot of money going in the bin. So Niland started thinking. His mind went back to those days when he was fresh out of his apprenticeship and working at Fish Face, the now-closed restaurant of well-known Sydney fish chef Stephen Hodges.
The young Niland had asked Hodges what garnishes went with what fish.
“He just turns around to me,” recalls Niland, “and he goes, ‘Why don’t you think of fish more as meat?’”
Hodges rattled off comparisons — tuna looks a bit like beef, mahi mahi tastes a bit like roast lamb, swordfish is kind of like pig — which, at the time, Niland found fascinating but “pretty ludicrous”.
But now, in financial stress and working unsustainable hours, the penny dropped.
He would treat fish like a butcher treats meat and experiment with making offcuts into sausages, terrines, pates and whatever else his imagination could conjure up. “Creativity and innovation was born out of this single problem of throwing too much of a fish away,” Niland says.
Saint Peter survived. It’s become not just a restaurant that serves a quality fish fillet, but a place where foodies flock to try the next weird but wonderful dish Niland and his team has created with fish scraps.
At 35, Niland is right up there with celebrated Australian chef Shannon Bennett of Melbourne’s Vue De Monde, whose poster he stuck to his bedroom wall as a boy growing up in East Maitland, near Newcastle.
Just why a 12-year-old Niland set his heart on becoming a chef “is hard to throw a pin into”, he says. But his drive to succeed has its roots in his childhood, when eightyear-old Niland was diagnosed with cancer.
“There is that drive and motivation that stems from a very young age,” says Niland, who now runs four venues, including one in Singapore, with his wife Julie. “(The feeling that) now you’ve overcome that, you can get a rocket pack on your back and you can do whatever you set your mind to.”