When Saint Peter first opened, it had to make use of a leaky deep fryer, and in fact, Josh Niland found that out on the very day of opening when he filled it with “20 liters of oil and then got warm toes. I looked down, and it had pinholes all through it.”
From that day to…today, the restaurant has grown to become one of the most influential in Australia. Josh and his wife Julie opened Saint Peter in 2016 on Oxford Street in Paddington, Sydney. In 2026, it marks a decade. Plus, Josh’s books have sold more than 235,000 copies and have been translated into 11 languages. At the age of 30, he even became the first-ever Australian to receive the James Beard Book of the Year award for his debut title, The Whole Fish Cookbook.
Now there is a new book, Saint Peter: Chapter & Verse, and it’s honestly the perfect reason to start from the start.
Two Young Cooks With One Big Dream
Josh grew up in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales and by the age of 15, he was already cooking in some Sydney restaurants. Before that, precisely at 8, he went through cancer, which meant he had to go for months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy sessions and had his kidney removed too. In his own words, getting through that phase was like having “a big rocket pack on my back at a very young age.”
When Josh and Julie met, Josh was 19, and Julie was 18, and both had a dream of opening their own restaurant. By the time Saint Peter opened, both had trained in serious kitchens. Like, Josh had worked under Peter Doyle at Est in Sydney and under Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck in the UK. Julie, a talented pastry chef, worked at Marque and Sixpenny.
Steve Hodges of Fish Face was the person who first encouraged Josh to think of fish as meat, and Josh calls him his “piscatorial north star.”
The couple found a site in 2015, and a loan from Julie’s father helped them take the plunge. Then something sweet (and honestly I’d say romantic too) happened. They came up with the same name at the same time for their restaurant – Saint Peter, the patron saint of fishermen.
A Sushi Train, A Jackhammer And A Fryer Full Of Holes
The site Josh and Julie found for their restaurant “used to be an old sushi train, so when you walked in, the end of the sushi train was a meter from the front door.” Finding a builder to rework that space as they envisioned was hard. Julie said, “We really didn’t know what we were doing.”
But then, and fortunately so, Nic Brownlee turned up. “He was this long-haired, surfy guy who was just lovely,” Josh says. “And he’d show up every day for the best part of two weeks with a jackhammer.” Nic says, “We reused bits and pieces of the old restaurant, turning old steel frames into shelving. Very on brand for Josh.”
When Josh learned that Nic could do art and graphic design as well, he asked him to draw the first Saint Peter logo as well, which is a John Dory with the black spot.
As for the rest, “Julie made all the tables with her dad,” Josh says. She found the chairs online. “I found Magis chairs on Gumtree that were worth $500 new, and I got them for $50 each. Afterward I resold them for $50, so they kept their value!” She also found the deep fryer (yes, the faulty one) on Grays Online.
During the soft opening (the first time they served), they found that the flat top grill was faulty and the floor crew had very little experience. It was so chaotic that Julie started canceling bookings the next day so the team could regroup.
Eventually, things worked out in their favor. Julie said, “I saw the belief Josh had in what he was doing and started believing in him as well.”
The Day A Fish Eye Became A Snack
Josh pitched Saint Peter as a fish eatery. “At the beginning I just wanted [Saint Peter] to be a place where people experienced the same joy I found in produce.” Weekend brunch, though, gave the kitchen room to play, and so they added to the menu dishes like spanner crab croissant, the sea urchin crumpet and the octopus Scotch egg too.
Then during winter Josh realized (his accountant called him to tell him how big of a mess they were in) that they had hired too many staff, but like what could he do? “I wasn’t going to let go of staff, and I wasn’t going to buy cheap fish. So what I did was that I put trays over the bins to stop us throwing fish scraps away. I figured, ‘if I can’t fix a wage problem, maybe I can fix a food waste problem’.”
The main issue was…okay, he may use every part of fish as something, but what about the eyes? He had no idea, but then “I woke up one morning and thought, ‘well, a prawn cracker would be fun’.” Every guest who sat down got one as a snack, and at the end of the meal the team told them it was made of fish eye. “Straight away, they’d giggle nervously. No one was ever really offended, but they were like, ‘Oh really?’ It worked. People got excited.”
In his latest book, Josh on this says, “Creativity and innovation cannot exist without a problem to solve.”
Growing Up On Fish Butchery
In 2018, the Nilands opened Australia’s first Fish Butchery a few doors down from Saint Peter. It sold lesser-known, under-fished species and products like octopus ham and smoked prawn sausages, and it worked as the restaurant’s processing depot.
When Covid happened in 2020, Niliand kind of got a chance to gut the restaurant and start fresh, and they revealed a new look in July that year. “After Covid, people were dancing in the streets to get back into restaurants.” Meanwhile, Saint Peter had just become an 18-seat, tasting menu-only counter. “Reopening in that format was exhausting. Suddenly we really had to be ‘on’.”
Julie said: “You had to talk to every customer, face to face. It was like a new muscle.” Joe Greenwood, now the head chef, saw the upside of the same. “It was great because it allowed you to really talk to the guests about what you’d cooked.”
In 2022, a second and much larger Fish Butchery opened in Waterloo. Some ventures that grew from it have since closed, but a partnership with investor George Penklis led to a new chapter. He owned a sleepy 1890s hotel a few blocks from the original restaurant, and he wanted Josh. “George loved watching Josh,” Wimmy Winkler (original Saint Peter restaurant manager, now restaurant host) said. “He would come in and just watch what he did.”
Josh was not sold on the idea at first. “I thought, ‘This place is pretty decrepit. And it’s really big.’” But he and George kept meeting every week, and over time he saw what George saw. Saint Peter now is in the heritage-listed Grand National Hotel in Paddington, which also has 14 boutique rooms upstairs.
Wimmy acknowledged how worried the entire team was about filling such a big room. “We needn’t have worried. In many ways it’s brought us closer to the customers because it’s given us a lot more space to showcase what we’re doing.” She describes the open kitchen as “a magical cinema.”
The People Josh Brought Along
The most telling stories about Saint Peter are from the people who work there. Greenwood remembers one of his first conversations with Josh. “He said, ‘What do you want from your career?’ That’s not a question many people ask.” Greenwood told him he wanted to open his own restaurant by 30, and Josh asked what it would take. “I’ve still got two years to go, but he’s given me the skill set to eventually go off and do it.”
Nic Brownlee, the builder who showed up with a jackhammer, now has a ten-year working relationship with the Nilands. “Just this year, I think I’ve done 14 or 15 pieces for them, including all the designs for the T-shirts for their collaborations. It’s amazing to have that kind of relationship.” Clifford says the Nilands always welcomed personality in the dining room. “As long as we’re hitting the right attention to detail, we can be ‘us’.”
Peter Doyle, who taught Josh early on at Est, keeps his own role small. “It’s like I was teaching him in kindergarten up to fourth class, but he was the one who went on and got his own university degree.” Then he sums up the decade with “He’s an original. You can’t underestimate how important that is.”
Asked what he wishes he had known at 21, Josh said, “That life is a marathon, not a sprint.” Ten years after a leaking fryer and a jackhammer in a sushi train, Saint Peter has proven him right.
