Tiny fine-diner Sushi Oe will relocate to the new development at Blackwattle Bay, joining other exciting Japanese venues offering a traditional, multi-course kaiseki menu and coastal-style hamayaki seafood barbecue.
After a redevelopment marred by delays and disputes with tenants, the tide is finally turning at Sydney Fish Market. The incoming complex has scored one of the city’s highest-rated and most exclusive Japanese restaurants.
Tiny fine-diner Sushi Oe in Cammeray – one of only two Japanese two-hatters in the latest Good Food Guide – moved one critic to describe it as a “small, singular seafood odyssey captained by a master of the craft”.
The restaurant is a favourite with in-the-know chefs seeking out the traditional approach of chef Toshihiko Oe, who’s been refining his craft for more than three decades. With only six stools around the counter, it’s also one of the most intimate venues in the city, and snaring a booking is notoriously difficult.
Making a reservation will become marginally easier when Sushi Oe relocates to the $836 million redeveloped Sydney Fish Market, which is nearing completion. Owner-chef Oe said he would bump up in size from six seats to eight when he crosses the harbour, and he’s already planning how he’ll juggle the increased numbers while maintaining his lofty artisan standards.
“I want to make sushi for more people,” Oe said. “It won’t change, same style.”
Part of the appeal for the chef is being closer to the seafood produce that underpins his culinary craft, and delivering it to locals and visitors in the surrounds of the new Sydney Fish Market.
Sushi Oe will be built as a separate restaurant space within a sprawling tenancy taken by premium seafood supplier GetFish. GetFish has been rolling out its GetSashimi brand across Sydney’s beaches (Manly is next), with a massive sushi train part of its plans at Sydney Fish Market.
A GetSashimi spokesman confirmed Sushi Oe isn’t the only Japanese talent it has teamed up with at its fish market space.
Chef Toru Ryu, from Neutral Bay’s upmarket Restaurant 16, will also open under the same roof. Ryu hasn’t decided if he’ll use the Restaurant 16 name when he opens at the new development, but said the venue would add to the diversity of the project by offering a traditional, multi-course kaiseki menu.
Ryu worked at Buon Ricordo restaurant in Paddington after moving from Japan, and while he described his cooking as predominantly Japanese, there’ll be the occasional Italian touch.
The Sydney Fish Market was tight-lipped about incoming operators at its new headquarters before Good Food revealed in May last year that a restaurant from celebrity chef Luke Nguyen, and a spin-off from the popular Malaysian venue Ho Jiak, were part of the plans.
But it’s the growing strength of the incoming Japanese restaurant offering that’s adding extra food clout. A standalone restaurant, Ichie, is also headed into the waterfront Pyrmont redevelopment. The venue is a joint venture between Takao Muramoto, who owns Ichie restaurant in Hokkaido in Japan, Sydney restaurateur Libras Ting and Hide Tsuboi, the Tokyo-trained chef-owner at Haymarket’s Hakatamon Ramen.
Tsuboi said the 176-seat restaurant would offer a first in the harbour city: “It’ll be the only Japanese restaurant in Sydney focusing on [coastal-style] hamayaki seafood barbecue, and we’ll do ramen as well.” There are longer-term plans to add kamameshi, the iron-pot seafood rice, to the Ichie menu.
When the venues will all open is the new million-dollar question at Blackwattle Bay. With internal fitouts already under way at some of the restaurants, and about to start at others, some tenants believe their doors could open as soon as November. But given the intensity of Christmas trading at the market, many say early 2026 is a more realistic target.
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