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Steven Snow’s new Tweed Coast venture offers an adventurous mix of exotically spiced fish.
FINS lives the dream of the far north coast’s famously, and envied, relaxed lifestyle. It’s Thursday night and five nights since Steve opened Fins on a shopping and restaurant row at Salt, a billion dollar resort and beachside housing development just below the Queensland border.
It follows his abrupt departure in July from Byron Bay’s Beach Hotel. Fins at Salt – 18 months on the drawing board – was planned as an empire expansion. Now it’s the flag bearer for Snow’s distinctive take on seafood; clean healthy flavours with exotic spicing drawn from north Africa, Portugal, Asia and Australia. New chef Sunichi Tanabe adds Japanese inflections
Snow’s enthusiasm puts labradors to shame. Most nights he greets diners to solicit feedback and spruik his produce, especially the local prawns. They’re not dipped in sodium metabisulphite, that substance which stops the heads from blackening but dulls the natural sweetness. The choice of line-caught fish changes daily.
 Tonight the chef sits at his backlit white marble bar having dinner with the restaurants designer and a Felton Road pinot noir ($132). Amusingly, they’re both tucking into a sirloin steak ($33). Behind the bar, the topography of the wavy feature wall glows like a Sahara sand dune at sunset. The reincarnated Fins is three places in one: cocktail bar, smartly casual restaurant and posh takeaway. It also offers a globally eclectic bar menu of a dozen tapas (if tempura vegetables, $13, qualify), matched with suggested tipples. Stradbroke Island Sydney rock oysters ($19 a half dozen) are impressive.
The maitre’d and sommelier are also absent this Thursday night. For the most part it doesn’t matter, although I’d like to know more about the Quinta do vallado ($74), a Portuguese blend of five grape varieties. Sommelier Ben Richards was outstanding when I visited in Fins first week.
Now our waiter is a little raw, but upbeat and surrounded by enough experience. It’s in keeping with the tone of casual elegance: high-backed, bone-coloured, micro-suede chairs and candlelit marble tables on an alfresco timber verandah that’s carved off the bar space by the footpath.
The a la carte menu is predominantly the stalwart dishes that built Fins’ reputation, plus the occasional remarkable invention, especially tempura soft shell mud crab on fish spatzle ($22). The small crisp, ginger and chilli-flavoured crustacean is like a punk haircut over a bed of edamame (fresh green soybeans) and the dumpling-like German noodles, which are tangy with preserved lemon. The fish and rice flour are unexpectedly light and pleasantly distinctive. Yuzu (the tart Japanese citrus) mayonnaise is sprayed across the plate for creaminess.
I wish the tapas were in the restaurant too, although some, such as the bamboo steamer of Tasmanian Pacific oysters thrillingly scented with kaffir lime, ginger, tamari and chilli ($20 half a dozen) are on the bar and a la carte menus. Another hit entrée is crisp-edged, hoisin coated Bangalow pork belly, Korean barbecue-style, under two sweet eastern king prawns ($23). The opulence is checked by a green mango salad floral with mint, coriander and a refreshing Vietnamese dressing.
The vegetarian Japanese dumplings ($18) on tamarind and tomato are like fat ravioli in gluey pastry with a dour filling of tempeh (fermented soybeans). Combined with snowpeas, wakame seaweed and tempura enoki mushrooms, it’s as appealing as picking through footpath offcasts during the council clean up.
Then there’s the gentle evolution of much-loved dishes. The wonderfully fragrant Moroccan tagine (from $29, depending on your choice of fish), previously as dense and musty as a Marrakech souk, seems sharper, with greater clarity. Now presented in a white bowl, the chermoula-capped fish lolls atop a bed of chickpeas intermingled with sweet potatoes, green beans and dates, plus the occasional spike of preserved lemon, mint and olives.
Mauritian seafood sambal ($33) arrives with an impressive cone of lotus leaf-wrapped jasmine rice. A tart, fish-sauce salty green paw paw salad balances the feisty, chilli-hot spices to prevent that relentless overwhelming.
The most refined main is a newcomer: roasted duck breast ($33) fanned over a jumble of soybeans, asparagus and shiitake mushrooms in a shallow master stock pool. It’s joined by a hoisin-sweet ravioli of shredded duck leg on pea and mint puree for an intriguing marriage of Mediterranean and Asian influences.
For dessert, flourless orange blossom-scented tangelo cake with saffron ice-cream ($12) wins points for presentation but the cake is a little too stodgy.
The new Fins is still finding its voice, yet Steve Snow’s quixotic seafood dishes are worth traveling for.”
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