First Look: Top Chef-Backed Fishmonger Portside Lands at Prahran Market

At Prahran Market’s new fishmonger Portside, you don’t just buy a fillet, take it home and hope for the best. You get easily traceable seafood prepared by restaurant chefs. The shop is the first retail venture from Glaswegian chef Stephen Nairn, culinary director of LK Hospitality, who oversees kitchens at South Yarra restaurants Omnia, Hot-Listed Yugen and YTB. At Portside, he and his team treat seafood exactly as they would in those dining rooms, then hand it over for you to finish cooking at home.

“In restaurants there’s a lot that happens to seafood before it hits the plate,” Nairn says. “It might be hung or aged, salted, smoked, cured or just handled in a very particular way to get the best flavour. Portside is about putting that work in for the home cook.”

Southern calamari from South Australia is cleaned and cross-hatched as it would be for service, ready to hit a hot pan or barbeque the second you get home. There are steamed mud crabs to treat however you like; scallops on the shell already dressed; and southern rock lobsters that have been gently cooked, split, brushed with yuzu kosho butter and wrapped in seaweed from Flinders Island, which just need a quick warm-through in the oven.

Everything behind the L-shaped cabinet is dry-filleted, meaning no ice or water dilutes the seafood. Some items come ready to eat, including a delicate garfish gently confited in smoked olive-infused Mount Zero olive oil, shocked cold and ready to serve straight from the fridge with a glass of wine.

A big part of Portside’s offering is what Nairn calls “enhancers”, products designed specifically to go with whatever you’re buying from the cabinet. There’s caper brown butter; saké and pink peppercorn butter; confit garlic miso butter; Vadouvan-spiced butter; den miso glaze for baking fish; classic mignonette and other oyster dressings.

Because Portside is backed by Nairn’s restaurants and production kitchen, those sauces and butters are made up of a range of staples and an ever-changing selection. Bouillabaisse (made from frames that would otherwise be discarded) and certain dressings will be regular fixtures, while others will shift with the seasons and the catches.

What lands in the cabinet each day is led by the fishers. Nairn works directly with people pulling product from Corner Inlet, South Australia and the New South Wales coast around Merimbula. Premium seafood, he says, is less about a famous species name and more about how it’s handled from boat to plate. Sometimes that means accepting the call that nothing was caught.

“It won’t be the same offer every time you visit,” he says. “But that’s the point. We want to be guided by the sea and then do the work so people can enjoy that at home without the stress.” 

Portside
Prahran Market, Stall 512/163 Commercial Road, South Yarra
No phone

Hours:
Tue 7am–4pm
Thu to Sun 7am–4pm

portsidemarket.com.au
@portside.melbourne