After eight years working almost exclusively with the fruits of the sea, the Nilands have struck land. At Petermen, meat’s on the menu, with that signature memorable, stunning Josh Niland execution.

“There’s no other place to get whole cuts of meat and fish like this,” Josh says bluntly. We’re in his St Leonards kitchen, and he’s plating up one of three new surf’n’turf options. Josh is known for his care and ingenuity with all things fish, sending the nose-to-tail approach around Sydney, Australia and then the world.

“What came first, the chicken or the fish?” he laughs. Cuts of heritage Sommerlad chook from Feather & Bone are lined up on one side of a plate, mirroring line-caught coral trout from Chris Bolton Fishing. A crisped-up tail and foot sit in the centre, and a “lush sidecar of fun” – glossy peas, thick asparagus spears, beans and sugar snaps – arrives too. “It’s the best version of roast chook that you can have.”

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The animals come in whole, to be broken down in-venue – resonating with the Niland use-everything ethos. “You’re not just going to get vanilla chicken breast on a plate, you’ll probably get a foot or a leg or a bit of something-something in there.”

A Bundarra pork chop is side by side with a dry-aged, bone-in swordfish steak. A rib-eye tuna steak with a grassfed Hereford sirloin. “On most of those dishes, I had to check which was which,” head chef Tom Foster laughs. He steers the ship with experience from London’s The Ledbury and Sydney’s just-closed Cirrus – and it was his presence in the kitchen that kickstarted the protein shake-up.

“For me personally, it was more of a creative exercise,” Josh says. “And leaning into your strengths: you’ve got all these guys that know a lot … [Tom] has a deep understanding of meat cookery, and I just haven’t scratched the meat itch for a long time. To have somebody as gifted as Tom cook meat as considerately as we do fish, it’s like ‘why not?’”

It’s a real boost to the restaurant’s personality, too. Petermen’s not a casual, à la carte alternative to Saint Peter – it’s its own thing. Namely, an expression of surf’n’turf or reef’n’beef.

“It started with the Father’s Day menu, I had fun thinking about it and it aligned so much with our thinking that anything you can do to meat, you can do to a fish. Like, you’re looking at it: there’s bones and loins and bellies, and crispies and tails and all the things … Anatomically they’re really similar – even the pink hue of both, the burnish gold of this.”

Without Saint Peter’s detailed spiels accompanying each course in St Leonards, the wonder of what you’re eating could be missed. “[It’s] hard for me to wrestle with sometimes, because there is no packet you can cut open to get a tuna rib-eye out of, there’s no packet with a big dry-aged swordfish rib. It’s very hard to even find an extraordinary chicken with feet on.

“Everything about [the food] is hard and challenging and incredibly fun and volatile. But as a guest you come in and go ‘We’ll get the beef and tuna’, and we’re just like ‘Great!’” Out it comes with hand-cut shoestring fries and salad. A wonder.

“We’re trying to do something here, play to our strengths and give people something that’s memorable, unique and technically done well.”

@petermendining