Fish & Chips at the Fishery, Milton, Brisbane

I have an issue with cooked fish ... I didn't even eat battered & fried fish as a kid. I ate lots of chips, and pluto pups, and bacon egg rolls, and pineapple fritters. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy eating fish! Mainly raw fish though. It's the texture of cooked fish I generally don't like. Living in Hokkaido for close to 3 years though, I have developed a whole new appreciation for fish .. tsubodai is my favorite thing to get at an Izakaya now - a rich, fatty fish from the Northern seas of Japan that is salted and hung to dry for a day or two before being grilled over charcoal. I even somewhere along the way, in my last couple of visits developed a real liking to battered fish - even when it tastes of more than oil & salt.

Now, we eat a fair bit of fish in Japan, as you would ... but it's the same with beef. We are blessed with some of the most premium beef & seafood products in the world. The quality is gob-smacking, and that's just the stuff in the supermarket! But, like we still often crave for a nice, grilled steak as everything you get in the stores is small portions, usually sliced very thin, and so rich I don't even think eating a 300g steak would be possible without some serious stomach cramps!

Fish is the same, the quality and variety of fish we get at the supermarket exceeds anything I could have dreamed of. But again, because of the quality & just their culture of how they eat, fish is eaten in small amounts, often raw, or grilled bone in, used to flavor stocks or salted & dried. A huge chunk of meaty, white fish coated in a thick batter and fried until golden .... nuh uh, not around here. Even if we are lucky to find seafood other than shrimp tempura'd, the batter is much lighter and the pieces of seafood would be tiny bite sized bits. Which brings me back to Fish & Chips. Something I now crave when heading back home. Sitting outside, by the water, a whole spread of deep-fried goodness with wedges of lemon & a Bundaberg Ginger Beer, bliss!!

The world of twitter introduced me to The Fishery at Milton. This was on our must-eat list. The address is punched into the Tom Tom and before we know it we are headed towards the GBB? "Take the GBB?!" WTF is the GBB? ahhhhhhhhhhh, the Go-Between-Bridge. We put our faith in Tom Toms hands and arrive at a little community shopping village. I imagined it would be by the water? We head inside and place our order.



There's a large menu on the wall, some daily specials, and showcases filled with all sorts of fresh seafood delights. We settle on some fried cod, crumbed whiting & sea scallops, home-made potato scallops & of course chips.



The chips are golden & crunchy, the perfect nest for all of the fresh, delicate seafood on top. The sea scallops were sweet, still translucent in the centre with a golden crumb coating. The whiting was salty & delicious, and the huge battered piece of cod was divine. We had home-made tartare & aioli to dip everything into and both stopped in our tracks with the first bite of potato scallop... Thick cut chunks of potato were coated in a dreamy batter and fried until the color of the sun on a clear Summers day.... Yeah, those little fried potatoes messed with my head.. hot, crispy, salty overload!

This was the first of several fish & chip meals on our visit home, and something I am already missing now we are back in Japan...

The Fishery
6A / 16 Baroona Rd
Milton QLD, Australia 4064

T: +61 (07) 3369 4707
Open Daily, 10am-8pm


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