For Australian chef Greg Doyle of Pier – famous for its fish – keeping things fresh was the key to success
- Greg Doyle’s Pier restaurant may have closed its doors but its dishes live on in the cookbook he published with fellow chefs Grant King and Katrina Kanetani
- Doyle took the Sydney establishment to a whole new level after he changed the way the restaurant’s fish was sourced and handled
For more than 20 years, Australian chef Greg Doyle’s name was synonymous with Pier restaurant in the Rose Bay area of Sydney. The chef closed Pier in 2012, opened another restaurant in its place (which has since closed) and retired from the daily running an F&B establishment.
But the dishes created by Doyle and his team, which included chef Grant King and pastry chef Katrina Kanetani, live on in their book, Pier (2007).
Doyle cites two experiences that helped Pier evolve over its 20-plus-year history: working at the Michelin two-starred Duquesnoy, a seafood restaurant in Paris, after which, “We dedicated ourselves to the mission of taking the cooking, or should I say the under-cooking, of fish to new levels”, as he writes in the book’s introduction, and dining at l’Atelier de Joël Robuchon while on a trip with friends to Greece and France, which prompted him to devote part of Pier to serving a tasting menu.
Another essential element in the evolution of the restaurant, which led to accolades that included three hats in The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide, was improving the quality of the fish they were serving.
“When Pier first opened, the only source of seafood of the quality we sought was from a company called The Flying Squid Brothers, run by John Susman. Then in the mid to late 1990s I was lucky to come across a gentleman named Mark Eather, who dealt in export produce only. We, along with Neil Perry’s Rockpool, were the only restaurants that he would supply. Mark introduced us not only to a new standard of quality and freshness, but also to a new approach to the packing, handling and storing of the produce. Mark had specifically trained fisherman who would only fish certain species, and they followed strict guidelines; the fish were hand-line caught and ikejime spiked, a gauge would be sent into the sea to measure the temperature of the water in which the fish was caught and then an ice slurry would be made to this temperature and the fish placed in it so that rapid rigor mortis was achieved.