In this week's cookbook review, Josh Niland presents Saint Peter: Chapter & Verse, a book marking ten years of Saint Peter, the Sydney fish restaurant that changed the way many chefs think about seafood.
Niland is the chef and owner of Saint Peter and the founder of Fish Butchery, and his books have become a reference in fish cookery. We have reviewed all of them, from The Whole Fish Cookbook, winner of the 2020 James Beard Book of the Year, to Take One Fish and Fish Butchery. Saint Peter: Chapter & Verse is the essential sequel to The Whole Fish Cookbook, a 458-page hardback published by Hardie Grant, with more than 100 recipes and photography by David Loftus.
"To me, fish had untapped potential to become centre stage," Niland writes in the opening chapter.
Saint Peter opened in 2016 as a small restaurant on Oxford Street in Paddington, and has since moved around the corner to The Grand National Hotel. The book tells that story through three long essays. The first traces the evolution of the restaurant, the second sets out Niland's whole fish approach, and the third looks at something few restaurant cookbooks ever cover: the mechanics of service, the daily rhythm and precision that keep a dining room like this one running.
The recipes are presented as "verses", woven through the narrative rather than collected at the end. They range from the foundational preparations the kitchen relies on every day to the dishes that defined Saint Peter's menus, including some of its most iconic creations.
If The Whole Fish Cookbook introduced the idea of treating fish with the same nose-to-tail respect as meat, this book shows what that looks like after a decade of service. Dry-aging, butchery, cooking, and presentation are all covered, and the message is consistent throughout: every part of the fish deserves rigor and attention, not only for the sake of sustainability, but because that is where flavor and texture are found.
As with Niland's earlier books, this is not a collection of quick weeknight fish dinners. Many recipes are ambitious, and some call for species that are easier to find in Australia than in Europe or the United States, so a very good fishmonger is essential. But even if you only cook a handful of recipes, the thinking behind them will change the way you buy, store, and cook fish.
Photography this time is by David Loftus, rather than Rob Palmer, who shot Niland's three previous books, and the change gives Saint Peter a look of its own. It is a richly layered, design-led book that works as well on the coffee table as it does on the kitchen shelf.
It also arrives with words of praise from Jamie Oliver, Heston Blumenthal, and Clare Smyth, which says a lot about how far Saint Peter's influence has traveled in ten years.
Saint Peter: Chapter & Verse is part memoir, part manifesto, and part working manual from one of the most influential seafood kitchens of its generation. It brings together everything Niland has been teaching across his previous books and grounds it in the restaurant where those ideas were tested every night for ten years.
For chefs, serious home cooks, and anyone who already owns The Whole Fish Cookbook, this is essential reading, and one of the best restaurant cookbooks of 2026.
Saint Peter: Chapter & Verse is the story behind Josh Niland's whole fish philosophy, and essential reading for anyone serious about seafood.
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