Grand design — Local Paddo

Josh Niland had a long wait when it came to opening the Saint Peter restaurant of his dreams. Between when he conceptualised opening the seafood fine diner inside the Grand National Hotel on Underwood St, and when he actually opened it, a plethora of obstacles stood in his way.

Among them: the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and travel restrictions, two years of rain, inflation, cost-of-living crises and an explosion in building costs.

“It’s been five and a half years, but we’re finally here,” Niland tells Local Paddo from the gleaming restaurant, bar and soon-to-open boutique hotel that has shape-shifted the former heritage pub into a hospitality offering that’s new and entirely different.

“That’s five and a half years of planning. And now to see it open and that it operationally works, that’s a pretty satisfying feeling.”

The venue opened on August 6, having relocated from its former, more modest home on Oxford St, which has been shuttered. At the same time, Niland’s other Paddington operation, the Fish Butchery, also closed so the team could concentrate entirely on creating the fine diner.

The new Saint Peter seats 40 in the dining room, 30 in the bar, and up to 14 in a private dining room. By contrast, the old Saint Peter seated 18. In October, the conversion of the Grand National’s upstairs into a boutique hotel of 14 rooms will also be complete. Niland and his wife Julie Niland will oversee the running of the hotel themselves.

Niland says he is confident that despite the size of the undertaking and the time it has taken to reach completion, he has built something that will last the long term.

“You always hope that the place will be excellent, and we want it to resonate with people for being a beautiful space. But when you see it open, it’s another thing,” he says. “There’s so much expectation on it, but I couldn’t be more confident in this place, personally.”

Niland says it’s his dream that the new luxurious Saint Peter — in one of Sydney’s most historic suburbs and one of the suburb’s oldest pubs — will create an iconically Sydney-centric experience that will attract diners from across the city, state, nation and internationally as well.

“We want people to say, ‘We’re going to Australia, we have to go to Saint Peter’, as they do about other restaurants around the world,” he says. “We definitely want to appeal to the international market, but to the national market, too. We want to be the first restaurant on people’s minds when they get off the plane.

“For people who care about dining, we want to give them this feeling that, ‘We’re going to Sydney, there’s this restaurant we have to go to before we go anywhere else’.”

For Niland, the new Saint Peter is the culmination of a career spent, to date, across (he estimates) nine restaurants that he has been involved in launching since his late teens (he’s about to turn 36).

He says that while he works on offering diners plates of effortless, delicious eating, what people often don’t realise is the creative effort and years of experimentation and close work with producers that goes into each dish.

“Into every dish goes very complex things and people do value that. For example, in a fish pie, while the aesthetics of the product served to the table are quite humble, I want people to just eat it and go, ‘F---, that’s the best fish pie I have ever eaten’.”

Apart from offering a new $275, nine-course degustation in the dining room, the new venue also offers a bar menu in the old public bar part of the hotel. Designers Studio Aquilo have fittingly left the bar looking like an updated iteration of the old Grand National; there’s even a counter looking out to the street like there was back in the heritage pub’s olden days.

“I remember coming in here when it was the dog pub,” Niland says, adding that he is very keen for locals to continue to use it as their local. “I have a lot of memories of it, like a lot of people do.”

The pub menu contains dishes including a yellowfin tuna and swordfish belly cheeseburger ($30), curried hapuka pie and salad ($40) and Cumberland sausage with barbecued tomatoes and chips ($42), plus a selection of snacks, from Mooloolaba swordfish empanadas ($14) and Mooloolaba tuna tartare ($28) to salt and pepperberry calamari ($32). Diners in the front bar can also order oysters and shellfish from a cold items list.

Sam Cocks from the vaunted Re bar is working in the cocktail bar, with the list including concoctions such as ‘Bergamot & White Chocolate' (with bergamot white rum, white chocolate, pine syrup and Verde Amaro) and ‘Seablite Sazerac’ (Beeswax Gospel rye, Seablite cognac, tea tree and bitters).

Niland says he hopes locals and Sydneysiders embrace the bar as well as the restaurant. He says that so far, Paddington people have been enthusiastic about the opening (and the end of construction), with many already calling the front bar their local.

“My biggest fear was that people would be upset that the hotel was no longer a heritage pub,” he says. “But my view is that Paddington is not short of a pub and now it has gone from being a pub to a more upmarket version.”

After surviving the first few frantic weeks of operation, Niland and Julie Niland are now focusing on finishing the upstairs rooms, with the luxury boutique hotel a place where diners can come and stay the night to enjoy the full Saint Peter experience. In the morning, the restaurant will offer in-house dining for guests set in the dining room so they can watch the kitchen prepare for the day.

“It will be a pretty special experience, we hope,” Niland says.

We will wait keenly for that one.