First Look: The Whopping 300-Seat Felons Seafood Lures an Ex-Rockpool Chef to Manly Wharf

Bush ingredients hitting plates in a Manly restaurant with room for 300 – across a breezy deck and dining room inside – is powerful. Warrigal greens, kelp and desert lime should be as stock-standard in our kitchens as soy sauce and balsamic vinegar. And that’s what’s guiding the just-opened Felons Seafood.

“There are [native] touches throughout the menu – we’re not going crazy,” head chef Luke Bourke, a proud Palawa man born on Darug Country in Western Sydney, tells Broadsheet. “We’re just showcasing little points on the menu where you can use it. A lot of menus around Sydney smash native ingredients, popping them on there for the name. Our menu is focusing on the ingredient and how it balances with the food.”

Together with leading Sydney chef Corey Costelloe ( 20 Chapel ), Bourke has set about delivering exactly the kind of menu you want in a beachside joint – where the swish fit-out takes nothing away from that breezy feeling you get when there’s still sand on your feet. Here, the produce does the brunt work.

“Start off with a beautiful oyster, with a beautiful kelp vinegar that’s fermented and produced by a local Aboriginal man [Gabriel Gutnik from Ziggy’s Wildfoods ], who’s fermenting and making it offsite for us,” Bourke says. “We’re working with not only native ingredients, but also native-supplied – which is a big thing for me.”

That same vinegar zings up cucumbers that have been compressed in Felons’ apple cider, and your choice of grilled fish comes topped with a roasted romesco salsa, where hazelnuts are swapped out for local macadamias.

Finger lime gems pop in the four-part raw and tartare section, and there’s a golden abalone schnitzel sandwiched by soft white bread. The fish’n’chips is up there with the best: a Felons beer batter is crisp and golden, and pickled warrigal greens speckle Bourke’s tartare recipe. A spesh malt vinegar is batched using excess Felons IPA.

“A lot of people say [they’re using local seafood], but literally when we stand on the wharf at Manly, some of the fish swimming in the water are what we’re going to be using on the menu,” Costelloe says. “Luderick, commonly known as blackfish, is in abundance – flounders, too. I’d hate to open up a seafood restaurant that had farmed barramundi and Tasmanian salmon.”

The chefs worked together at Rockpool for a decade during Costelloe’s 15-year tenure at the restaurant. So when he saw Bourke’s name on the list of head chef applicants, the hiring decision was “easy”.

With Felons Seafood, they’ve scored a very nice new office. It’s part of Brisbane-born brewery Felons’ Sydney move, which saw the team open an on-the-wharf brewery in October last year. Felons Seafood has completely reinvented The Bavarian’s beerhall.

“We were catching [glimpses of] a few whales the other day, and all the fish swimming under the wharf,” Bourke says. “Sometimes you’ll catch a little dolphin here and there, surfing off the back of the ferries.”

Felons Seafood
East Esplanade, Manly
(02) 9977 1266

Hours:
Daily 11am–11pm

felonsseafood.com.au
@felonsseafood