The Tuna Loin Cut at the Table

A 400-gram loin of dry-aged tuna arrives at the table whole.

The server has a board, a knife, and a clean cloth. He cuts the loin into three thick portions in front of you, maybe ninety seconds, no narration, and arranges the slices on a warm plate with a small dish of béarnaise next to them. The colour of the flesh is the wrong colour for tuna. Not red, not bright, but a darker maroon with the muscle's grain visible across the cut surface. That colour is the cabinet's first visible work: fifteen days of dry-ageing on the loin have pulled out the water and concentrated the fat into something denser, drier on the surface, deeper at the centre.

More on the rest of the meal shortly. The tuna explains why the restaurant exists in this shape, in this room, at this price, in 2025.

FYSH opened in January 2024 on the ground floor of the Singapore EDITION at 38 Cuscaden Road. The chef-partner is Josh Niland, the Sydney cook whose Saint Peter and Charcoal Fish kitchens have spent the better part of a decade arguing that the modern restaurant industry's treatment of fish, fillet the loin and bin the rest and change to a different species two days later, is wasteful in the obvious sense and bad cooking in the less obvious sense. His Singapore chef de cuisine is Liam Smith, on the line every service. The operating spine is the EDITION brand, sitting under Marriott. The room is one hundred and fifty-four seats; the main dining room runs eighty in jade velvet banquettes around a Calacatta marble bar.

That room is the structural tension. Niland's working argument was developed in small, casual, deliberately intimate rooms. Saint Peter in Sydney seats roughly thirty, runs lunch as much as dinner, and is calibrated for diners who have bought into the whole-fish ethic before they sit down. FYSH is the opposite shape. It is large. It is polished. It carries an EDITION's brand-standard fit-out and the operating overhead that comes with it. The instinct, with this kind of transplant, is to soften the original cooking until it fits the carpet. Most international chef licences in Asia have, in fact, done exactly that.

The eye-opening thing about FYSH, two years in, is that it has refused to.

The cabinet has earned its space

The dry-ageing programme is the most direct sign that Niland's approach has made it through the move intact.

The technique is older than most diners realise, since long-aged fish has been part of regional Japanese cooking for decades, in a different register, but applying it at a Western-restaurant scale, with a dedicated cabinet running multiple cuts of multiple species at staggered ageing windows, is a recent development. Niland is the cook who has done the most to argue for the practice at this scale. The cabinet at FYSH is operational: the tuna I ate had been aged fifteen days on the loin, sourced from Walker Seafoods, the only sustainability-certified wild-caught tuna operation in Australia. The cabinet's contents change weekly. The kitchen is not ageing fish as a marketing gesture. The kitchen is ageing fish because the eating is better.

The first bite told me whether the ageing had done anything. The texture had genuinely changed. Raw tuna at the loin is dense, glossy, slightly slippery on the palate, the muscle holding its water at full capacity. The aged version was firmer, more chew-resistant, with a real depth of flavour the unaged version would not have produced. The protein had begun to break down enough to give each slice more give. The taste was richer, a rounder saltiness, a deeper mineral note, a finish that ran longer across the palate than fresh tuna's would have. The béarnaise was the telling choice. The instinct, with fish this good, is to refuse the sauce. Niland's kitchen refused the refusal. The fish had been built, fifteen days in the cabinet, specifically to hold a warm tarragon emulsion the way beef holds it. That is steakhouse logic imported onto fish, and it is what Niland has argued all along: fish can carry the sauces beef can carry, provided it has been built to take them.

By the second slice the plate had made its case. The ageing had earned its cabinet space, the béarnaise had earned its place, and the portion, generous in the way fine-dining fish courses almost never are, refused to apologise for the price by shrinking the fish. The tuna was a steak on a steakhouse plate, and the kitchen had decided to compete on those terms.

That one course says what the whole kitchen has decided to do.

The eye in the madeleine

The dessert sequence carried a small tuna-eye madeleine that made the same point as the tuna.

The madeleines arrive as part of the closing, warm and shell-shaped, dusted with a faint sugar, and read on the first bite as competent French petits fours. The trick is what is in the batter. The eye fat of the tuna has been rendered and folded into the madeleine mix, doing the structural fat work that dairy butter would have done in a standard recipe. The diner does not taste the eye. The diner tastes a slightly richer, slightly more savoury madeleine than a butter-only batter would have produced.

Keeping the eye invisible is what makes the dish work. The ethic is being practised here, not performed.

A lesser kitchen, given the marketing opportunity of the eye in the dessert, would have made the eye visible. The madeleine would have been served with a small narration, the eye would have been mentioned by the server, and the dish would have carried its origin story up to the table. FYSH's kitchen has done the opposite. The eye is in the batter, the batter is in the madeleine, and the diner can ask if they want to know. Otherwise, the petit four is a petit four, and the eye is doing its small invisible work where work is supposed to happen, inside the cooking rather than on top of it.

That restraint is the harder thing to pull off. Plenty of kitchens use the offcut as a talking point. Using it because it genuinely improves the cake, and then saying nothing about it, takes more confidence. FYSH, on the meal I ate, mostly did the second thing.

Where the program slips

The restraint lapses on the fish charcuterie board.

The board arrives as a small slate carrying five separate items: cured swim bladder, smoked roe, a cool parfait built from heart and liver, a small jelly made from the head's collagen, and the standard accompaniments of crisp bread, pickles, and mustard seeds. The components are individually competent. The swim bladder has the right firm chewy bite, the roe has the right salinity, the parfait has the right fatty cool depth. The head-collagen jelly was the weakest of the five, the texture correct but the flavour underdone, the head's reduced depth not quite landing the way the kitchen presumably intended.

The board itself was the most performative thing on the table. Five separate little demonstrations of the offcut programme, lined up on one piece of slate, the whole arrangement nudging you to notice how clever it all was. That kind of board belongs to the loud version of whole-fish cookery, the one that wants the diner to feel virtuous about eating the parts other restaurants throw out. The rest of FYSH has been busy avoiding that tone. The board slips into it.

A guest who can absorb one slightly demonstrative plate will not find FYSH a difficult room. A guest who is allergic to performance on the plate should order one component from the board rather than the whole arrangement, and let the kitchen's quieter moves carry the meal.

What survives the hotel

The deeper friction is the marquee positioning itself.

The casual Sydney bistro where Niland worked out his approach was, by design, the kind of room that let him pursue an austere idea without the overhead a luxury hotel imposes. FYSH does not have that freedom. The 154-seat dining room has to be filled, the brand-standard service ratio has to be staffed, and the hotel's pricing band has to be defended. The 400-gram tuna at the upper-range price point reads as a steakhouse plate because the kitchen has chosen to compete on steakhouse terms, and that choice is what the economics required.

Whether that bargain is right depends on the diner. A guest expecting the casual Sydney register will find FYSH too polished. A guest expecting the standard hotel-marquee fish room will find the whole-fish ethic distracting. FYSH lives in between, and it has mostly made its peace with that.

The other operational note is the kitchen's hand. Niland is in Singapore at intervals, not every service. Liam Smith runs the line. The local team has executed the program cleanly on the meal I ate. The diner is, by structural necessity, evaluating Smith's interpretation of Niland's brief rather than Niland's hands directly. On the night I ate, the brief had held.

What the kitchen is for

FYSH is one of the few international chef-led rooms in this city where the original cooking has been moved into a marquee hotel and survived the move. The dry-ageing cabinet runs full time, the offcut programme produces dishes the city's other fish restaurants are not producing, the eye-fat madeleine does its work invisibly, and the local team has been trusted to run the brief without the chef in the kitchen every night.

The 400-gram tuna loin, cut at the table and served with a warm béarnaise the cooking was specifically built to hold, showed that the stance survived a room that should have sanded it down. Most chef licences in Asia flatten the original cooking to fit the carpet. On the meal I ate, FYSH did not.

The eye-fat madeleine is the last small piece of evidence that the kitchen still cares about the parts of the animal the diner is not, on the face of it, paying to engage with. In a luxury hotel that could have opened a competent fish steakhouse and stopped there, that is the more interesting choice.