Buy Seafood Prepared by Top Restaurant Chefs at Stephen Nairn’s New Fishmonger

At South Yarra restaurants Yugen and Omnia, culinary director Stephen Nairn serves delicately plated kingfish with rhubarb and grapefruit; trios of shelled king prawns draped over a pool of shellfish sauce with shiso leaf and preserved lemon; and sashimi platters adorned with edible flowers. At his new Prahran Market shop Portside, the Glasgow-raised chef wants to use his restaurant expertise to help home cooks raise their seafood game.

“There’s always a little bit of mystique, confusion or apprehension about seafood cookery,” he says. “We’ve basically built and designed a store that is seafood-focused, but [working] through the lens of my many years as a chef to bridge the gap and make seafood cookery a little bit more accessible and fun.”

Portside will take fewer cues from Josh Niland’s influential Fish Butchery and more from the seafood shops of Scotland and France, where Nairn says the seasons are a huge influence on what’s available.

The chef will leverage the relationships he has with local fisherpeople to supply the shop, which is opposite G McBean Family Butcher. But the main draw is that Nairn and his team will prepare the seafood as they would if it was being served at one of his restaurants, then guide you in how to best cook and serve it. “As a chef, and within restaurants, there’s a wide variety of techniques that we apply to different species of fish to get it ready to the point where we would cook it at a restaurant. Whether that is salting, preserving, smoking, curing, or how it’s cut, how it’s hung, if it’s aged, if it’s not aged – these techniques are super important to extract the flavour from a particular species.”

He likens the experience of shopping at his new fishmonger to going to a wine store and telling the clerk a story about your plans for the evening and how you see the bottle slotting in. “The shop is about curation. Chatting with people, saying, ‘What are you looking for? What are you going to be doing tonight?’ We want to understand and listen to what people are trying to do and then help them.”

Nairn, who has worked in prestigious kitchens including Eleven Madison Park in New York and Vue de Monde, says the shop will also sell a range of products to accompany your seafood, such as yuzu kochu butter, oyster dressings and “all these different enhancers.”

Portside opens at Prahran Market on Thursday December 11.