How Tasmania produces some of the world’s best seafood

There aren’t many capital cities where you can go 10 minutes out of town and be in the snow, or under a waterfall,” says skipper Tomas Thiele as he steers our canary yellow touring boat down the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

You can tell Tomas grew up in Tasmania because he can pronounce D’Entrecasteaux. I’ve lived here for years and I still can’t. He also knows where to find two highly prized exports. Purchased locally, sea urchin sells for A$275 (£140) for 100 grams, and abalone for A$450 (£230) per kilogram, so plucking them straight from the water holds high appeal.

It’s just after 11am when we dock at Partridge Island, an hour from the Tasmanian capital of Hobart, which serves as a lunch stop for Pennicott Wilderness Journeys’ seafood tour. It’s September, early springtime in chilly southern Tasmania, where icy, nutrient-rich waters create the perfect marine microclimate.

“The water is 12C, which is warming up,” Tomas tells me as he pulls on a wetsuit. I dip one hand into the channel and decide it feels much cooler. While Tomas free-dives, I eat Pacific oysters simmered in local sparkling wine, their briny flesh complemented by a boozy tang. Pacifics, introduced in the 1940s as a fast-growing alternative to the rare native angasi oyster, are loved for their buttery, saline meat and their ocean-cleaning properties.

Thirty minutes later, Tomas resurfaces with two abalone and a mesh bag of spiny urchins. I hold a grapefruit-sized urchin in my hand, its purple spines waggling in slow motion, as Tomas smacks the base of another with a butter knife, releasing its fragile insides. The edible parts are reproductive organs, he explains. He gives them a quick rinse in seawater before we eat them whole, plucking them out with our fingers. They taste sweet and minerally, with a concentration of flavour that will naturally fade within a few hours.

Next, Tomas slides his knife between an abalone’s lip and shell, working the blade to release the muscle. “We’re going to do this the Tasmanian way,” he says, using a mallet to tenderise the abalone, now encased in a food bag on the deck. “If you try it plain, you get a sense of the natural flavour.” I skewer some raw with a toothpick. It’s firm and a bit chewy, with slight salinity. Once cooked in butter, garlic and lemon, it will taste like calamari.

As we eat, Tomas breaks down a southern rock lobster plucked from a local crayfish pot earlier this morning — you get a lot of meat from a lobster if you know what you’re doing, I surmise — and shucks a few more oysters. “I’d pick this over a sit-down restaurant any day,” one of my companions aptly acknowledges.

Back on dry land, Hobart’s waterfront is the epicentre of the capital’s seafood scene. A working port since colonisation, many of its hotels, bars and restaurants are housed in heritage-listed sandstone buildings along the River Derwent. Its picture-perfect backdrop is Mount Wellington, or kunanyi in palawa kani — the only Aboriginal language left in Tasmania/lutruwita, which rarely uses capital letters with an exception being people’s names.

I’m hunting for scallop pie. Featuring whole scallops cooked in a curried bechamel sauce and encased in flaky pastry, it’s a uniquely Tasmanian offering, with a key ingredient— Keen’s Traditional Curry Powder — first produced here in the early 1860s. Harbour Lights Cafe, a wooden building sandwiched between Christian organisation Mission to Seafarers and a ship supply store, has been making the pies since the 1970s. The waiter delivers the A$21 (£11) iteration and, as is customary, I remove the lid and count the scallops. There are four, a little on the lean side. The shortcrust pastry is well made and the sauce has a decent kick, but it’s no match for a wallaby pie — another local speciality.

Later that evening, it’s time for some seafood innovation at Aløft, a tasting menu-only restaurant on Brooke Street Pier. Owned and run by Tasmanian chef Christian Ryan, the venue’s harbour views through its floor-to-ceiling windows are spectacular, with masthead lights twinkling out on the water.

Aløft’s seafood-forward menu pays homage to its location, though the crayfish tattoo on Christian’s right forearm is a more permanent endorsement. And while the ingredients are local, his cooking is influenced by the flavours of Thailand, Japan and China, which came to Australia by way of immigration. Sichuan pepper-tossed wallaby tartare is followed by a raw Stanley Bay scallop doused in piquant nahm jim green chilli sauce; yellowtail kingfish is adorned with a textural sunflower seed emulsion and punchy granny smith apple.

I busy myself with a dirty martini while Christian’s head chef, Cameron Brunton, shucks Bruny Island-grown oysters. “It’s a way to hold on to summer through winter,” Cameron says as he spoons a luminous orange mignonette sauce — made from dried nasturtium flowers — over my oyster. The flavour combination verges on synaesthesia, the oyster’s briny tingle followed by a wash of earthy emulsion.

I’ve eaten oysters at Aløft many times— the restaurant turns 10 next year — but I’ve never had this dish, these flavours. “The base starts as something traditional, then we throw in something local, and that hopefully translates to something we haven’t eaten a million times elsewhere,” Christian says. With an attitude like that, I’d say Aløft’s best years are still ahead.

Keeping culture alive

The next afternoon, I drive 15 minutes out of Hobart to meet 24-year-old Kitana Mansell, a proud palawa woman. Kitana runs palawa kipli, a native food business and bush tucker tour at Risdon Cove, the site of the first British settlement in Tasmania in 1803. In an act of reconciliation, the government returned this land to the Aboriginal community in 1995.

Kitana tells me the cove was a source of protein for her ancestors, before land clearing and the nearby zinc refinery altered the ecosystem. I stand on a small footbridge on the east bank of timtumili minanya, the palawa name for the Derwent. Below the water are abalone and angasi oysters.

There are eight of us here today — keen gardeners, mostly, and all locals. Wearing pink high-top trainers and a ‘Sovereignty Stand United’ T-shirt, Kitana leads us around her native grocery store. We inspect an indigenous cherry tree, or lintalumala, laden with tiny green orbs which will be perfect for chutney when ripe, and kunzea flowers that smell like thyme and rosemary with a hint of lemon, said to be good for the immune system. “At palawa kipli we have a great opportunity to show what Aboriginal people can do when their land is returned. We’re slowly getting native edible plants back into Country, to promote how we live, and that we’re still here, thriving and surviving,” Kitana says, referring to the lands to which Aboriginal peoples are connected.

As we snack on smoked wallaby and wattleseed hummus under eucalyptus trees, I ask about muttonbird, a short-tailed seabird. “Most of our traditional food is seafood,” Kitana says. “Muttonbird is one of the most unique Aboriginal foods in lutruwita (Tasmania). We still harvest it today, which is great because it’s one of the oldest living food practices in the world.” I’d love to try some, but the summer season lasts just a few weeks. “Imagine like… a fishy chicken,” Kitana says. “I marinate it in kunzea honey and cook it over fire.”

Somewhat less rustic, my next stop is the nearby Lexus showroom. Hidden in the back is Omotenashi, a 10-seat kaiseki experience by chefs Lachlan Colwill and Sophie Pope, who moved here from South Australia with this concept in mind. “Our idea was that Tasmania and Japan have very similar produce, particularly seafood,” Lachlan says.

I arrive at 6.28pm, cutting it fine for the 10-minute arrival window allocated to corral a group of strangers. Instead of a menu, Sophie hands out a list of suggestions, including keeping our grimy smartphones off the table and treating the antique crockery gently.

Lachlan and Sophie work the open kitchen — a stone bench, a sink, a steam oven and a hibachi grill — with a near-choreographed elegance gleaned from twice-yearly trips to Japan. “Experience is everything,” Sophie says. “If we never left Tasmania, we’d be emulating knock-offs. If we throw ourselves into ‘new’, it’s going to be a lot more exciting.”

I swipe a cube of sake-steamed abalone through liver-spiked cream cheese and pop it in my mouth, followed by an oyster so large it warrants two bites. It’s a Jon’s Reserve, Lachlan explains. These prized Pacific oysters are hand-turned in the water for twice as long as the standard issue, so they grow fatter and sweeter. “It’s more the texture, to us. It’s a meatier oyster,” Lachlan says.

Thumb-sized pieces of school whiting arrive next. “(School whiting) are 10 centimetres long,” Lachlan says, which makes them easy to buy but difficult to prepare. “They have this super clean, sweet flavour that reminds us of ayu, a Japanese river fish you can’t get here.”

Hours pass as Lachlan and Sophie waltz through their 18-plate production, crafting an alternate universe so rich in detail it somehow seems only natural that you’d find the state’s best seafood in a luxury car showroom. “This plate is from the Edo period,” Sophie says as she clears a tiny blue dish that held slivers of broadbill swordfish. “It’s about 200 years old. But I tell people that after, because it’s less stressful,” she says with a grin.

Another antique, of sorts, lies across the waterfront at Mures Fish Centre, where I visit Mures Upper Deck, a recently renovated first-floor restaurant overlooking Victoria Dock. At water level, sister venue Mures Lower Deck churns out fish and chips, while Pearl and Co is all about oysters.

I’m meeting Will Mure, whose parents George and Jill opened Mures Fish House in Battery Point back in 1973. Today, Will and his wife Jude run Mures — comprising three restaurants, a cocktail bar, two drop-line fishing boats, a processing facility and a range of take-home products.

I’ve come to eat blue-eye trevalla, which the family has drop-line fished since 1977. “Trevalla a la creme was my favourite when I was a kid,” Will says of Mures’s then signature blue-eye fillet drenched in a rich tarragon sauce. Everyone loves blue-eye because it’s an all-rounder, he says. “No bones, flaky white flesh, moist and easy to cook.”

While we wait for my modern iteration — a pan-fried blue-eye fillet with a swirl of pureed pumpkin and tangy marinated courgette — I ask Will about the farmed Atlantic salmon on his menu. I eat salmon occasionally, but I’m cautious about it. Some local producers have been accused of misdeeds ranging from water pollution to killing native wildlife. Aquaculture in Macquarie Harbour, where the endangered Maugean skate reside, is particularly problematic. Some restaurants — Omotenashi and Aløft included — boycott salmon completely.

Mures’s salmon is sourced from select farms certified by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), an independent body with strict sustainability guidelines. Despite the controversy, salmon is still popular, Will says. Many tourists don’t know about its ecological baggage. “The whole point of aquaculture is growing food for people to eat. Sustainability for wild fisheries means making sure there’s fish left in the ocean. From an aquaculture perspective, it’s about the impact (farming) has on the surrounding area,” he says. “It’s a difficult one, because as a human you have an impact in everything you do.”

People are quickly discovering what Tasmanians already know: it’s one of the planet’s most incredible places for food. And its seafood industry is a big part of the reason why. Managing its growth to have a positive impact on both the environment and the economy will always be a balancing act. “Fish farming needs to exist, because there aren’t enough wild fish to eat the way we do,” Omotenashi’s Sophie Pope had said (with the caveat that she doesn’t think salmon is right for Tasmanian waters). “Maybe we need to treat seafood more like the luxury item it is.”