Sydney has a new three-hat restaurant, and it’s in a former pub

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Got milt? Saint Peter sure does. At Paddington’s most famous fish restaurant, milt is cured with rosemary and pepper, cold-smoked overnight, and matured for three weeks to develop a texture not dissimilar to sweetbreads. It’s then fashioned into a ball, crumbed and fried, and served in a ramekin with herby North African condiment chermoula, diced coral-trout liver and wild garlic. Milt is fish semen, by the way.

Welcome to the plush new location of eight-year-old Saint Peter, helmed by chef Josh Niland and his wife, Julie, at refurbed Paddo pub The Grand National Hotel. After more than a year of building delays, the restaurant opened in early August. If you want to think of the couple’s original Oxford Street digs as Niland Land, this new site is Niland World.

“Come and enjoy the magic of scale-to-tail cooking across a 12-room boutique hotel and restaurant,” is what the brochure might say. “Let your journey begin with a martini and oysters in the table-service bar before moving to a velvet banquette or curved booth in the elegant dining room. The space evokes the Australian landscape with earthy tones and original art curated by Olsen Gallery and Ken Done.

If you want to think of the original Oxford Street digs as Niland Land, this new site is Niland World.

“An a la carte menu will be offered for lunch, featuring aged and fresh seafood caught by the best fishers in the country, while dinner is a seven-course tasting menu for $275 per person. In-house guests can retire to their sound-proofed room and enjoy our bespoke fish-fat soap, which creates a luxurious lather, and light fish-fat candles. Breakfast will be crumpets, honey and swordfish bacon.”

Those rooms will be available from October and start in the vicinity of $600 a night, but you don’t need to spend that kind of money to have a nice time here.

I would be just as happy with another session in the front bar with Jervis Bay mussels preserved in saffron oil ($22) or a curried hapuka pie and salad ($40). You can get a Resch’s on tap for $12 and watch the sun set across neighbouring terraces. For all its worldly ambition, Saint Peter also feels very Sydney, very Paddington.

But to the tasting menu. The main event. The reason why Saint Peter has garnered three hats for the first time. It largely follows the French tradition of soup, starters, seafood, meat and dessert, a framework to showcase the near-limitless potential of fish.

The current “meat” course is a fillet of big-eye tuna, dry-aged for eight days and wrapped, Wellington-style, with mushroom duxelles in sour-cream pastry. Thumping with fish-bone jus gras and black garlic, it could hold up to anything old and red from sommelier Houston Barakat’s excellent wine list. Soup is coral trout consomme with a laser-cut line of flavour, and noodles made from a paste of the fish’s pressure-cooked bones.

Charcuterie follows: Murray cod chorizo, luscious flathead mortadella, spicy tuna ‘nduja stuffed in an olive. In tonight’s performance, cooked down tuna ’nduja with rendered cod fat will also be playing the part of bolognese in a pasta course with barely grilled calamari (membrane removed so there’s no resistance and chew) coiled into a silky nest of “spaghetti”. Applause. Curtain call. Ovation.

“Coral trout and its parts” is the menu’s lodestar. The parts: that delicious milt croquette and liver chermoula. The pearlescent fish: line-caught, filleted and wood-grilled, and plated with a garden of bull kelp, native thyme and snow pea flowers bolstered by a frothy butter emulsion.

A custard and bergamot tart topped with meringue showcases pastry chef Charlie Hutton’s command of technique, as do her caviar-crowned caneles. Assorted native-fruit sorbets (muntries, quandongs, lemon aspen and more) pulse with a fragrance and flavours that will freeze you in place.

For all its worldly ambition, Saint Peter also feels very Sydney, very Paddington.

It would take another page to do justice to the a la carte lunch, a two-hat experience unto itself. Barbecued garfish ($36) on a vinegar-forward pine-nut salsa with the most floral capers I’ve ever encountered; dry-aged albacore tuna fine-tuned with bergamot ponzu and freshened by discs of green apple, cucumber and radish ($36); peerless, crumbed King George whiting ($72) and chips ($14). (It’s not all livers and eyes and “Oh, my!” , you know.)

Despite the occasional, jarring Charles Mingus tune, this is a more settled Saint Peter with heightened service to boot. With other restaurants to manage in St Leonards and Singapore, you might wonder if there are two Josh Nilands performing this high-wire act.

There’s not, of course, it’s just him and Julie backed by the skill and drive of a dedicated team. A team pulling together to deliver one of the most cracking times you can have sitting at a table in Sydney.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine