Ho Jiak’s Fish Market spin-off embraces the kitsch with a subversive take on surf-and-turf

The Sydney Fish Market, in with the throng of auctions, live tanks and the diversity of its species, has always harboured elements of culinary conservatism. Fixed onto the building like a limpet is an obsession with value and a mild 𝄒60s scepticism about the quality of fresh seafood. Your biggest, cheapest lobster drowning in cheese please, cooked until we know it’s dead. Piles of oysters Kilpatrick and mornay, sweating hard in the hotbox.

Decades since it first opened, the market has never really shaken this off. It explains why public discourse, after $836 million launched the new site, undoubtedly the most impressive in the southern hemisphere, continues to fixate on price rather than the vastly improved range or quality.

But then, we kind of love this about the market, too. The excess, the appetite, the hulking lobsters, the heaving platters.

What’s the right restaurant to open here, anyway? Maybe, just maybe, it looks like Tam Jiak. Named for the Hokkien term for gluttonous, it leans into rather than eschews these facets of the Fish Market, embracing the kitsch with a surf-and-turf concept, filtered through the eyes of a Malaysian chef who credits both his amah and Ian “Huey” Hewitson for inspiring him to cook.

Junda Khoo, the chef in question, was one of the first major names to be announced going into the new building. Given his success with the Ho Jiak restaurants – three in Sydney, one in Melbourne – launching another here, just with a stronger seafood presence, would have been the money move.

Instead, Tam Jiak brings land and sea together at every opportunity. In some cases, it’s an overt marriage, like in a “tandoori” pappadum topped with diced raw tuna and beef striploin, folded together with garam masala over coconut yoghurt, an eye-opening, textural bite. In others, it’s a more restrained nod, as in the sambal belachan kangkung – a Ho Jiak staple of water spinach stir-fried with shrimp paste – strewn with popping deep-fried hunks of lard and slippery squid rings.

One of Tam Jiak’s strengths is its willingness to explore the full spectrum of Malay cooking. A squid and lamb biryani, like the pappadum, tugs at threads with India. Teow Chew soy sashimi, Nyonya mignonette and plenty more are drawn from the Malay-Chinese repertoire.

But then the curry Kilpatrick oysters couldn’t exist anywhere other than right here. Deep, bowl-like Pacifics are scattered with bacon, before Khoo spoons over a reduction of curry paste, barbecue sauce and Worcestershire sauce and flashes them under the grill. You have to like grilled oysters to enjoy them, but if you do, it’s a successful, subversive spin.

There’s so much opportunity for this concept to land like a bad joke – the most expensive thing on the menu served with the second-most expensive thing; lobster stuffed with tacos – but in many instances, the dishes fit neatly in Khoo’s repertoire. Tom yum “bombs”, a sequel to Ho Jiak’s har mee and laksa bombs, present as dumplings stuffed with chicken, prawn and squid in a galangal and coconut-scented dressing. A tumble of king crab atop the lup cheong-studded char kwai teow brings jolts of sweetness to the fiery, soy-darkened noodles.

When Tam Jiak falters, it’s by trying too hard to hit the brief in every single dish. It’s a novel idea to list handmade chicken noodles and to then actually make the noodles out of chicken, fish-paste noodle-style, but their thickness means the things they’re stir-fried with, including thinly shaved conch, don’t really cling to them when you pick them up. Glazing duck with squid ink so its skin turns black is striking, but the dish would be better served by getting the texture of the meat more supple first.

One of Khoo’s wilder ideas is combining lamb and barramundi in the tong mo, a take on the beef sausage popularised in Malaysia by Cham refugees. But the barramundi flesh does wonders for the texture, supplanting the lamb mince’s natural mealiness with levity and bounce. Chalk it up as a win, especially wrapped in betel leaves with house hot sauce.

Like Khoo’s more recent openings, the fitout here is heavily polished, the only real colour a vibrant Penchan Pumila artwork inspired by Nyonya batik and Peranakan heritage, which draws the eye to Blackwattle Bay. Despite the soul in the cooking, though, it’s hard to shake the sense of sitting inside a 3D render, all hard edges and smooth surfaces.

But then comes the live crab, a big Northern Territory muddie in a cascade of Malaysian chilli. You pull on plastic gloves, crack a claw and suck out the flesh, sweep up the belachan-scented sauce with mantou. You add a bowl of pipis, tossed in black pepper curry, and prise them from their shells.

There’s no turf in this section, the concept collapsing into pure, animalistic deliciousness. The mission is admirable, but this is where Tam Jiak makes most sense, centred around exceptional seafood and nothing else. More please.

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