Chinese $$$ $ You’re in a restaurant, there are waiters and chopsticks, but there’s a big obstacle between you and dinner. You have to catch it. That’s the idea at Fishing Season, the Yunnan-style seafood restaurant with a large pool for Murray cod and eel on the ground floor, and a dining room with tabletop hotpots up above.
Choose eel or cod and you’ll be handed a net and pointed to the right part of the tank. The best technique is to spot your prey, swiftly thrust your net underneath, then whoosh it upwards to secure your meal. It’s then taken away for speedy dispatching.
If you’re not feeling your inner hunter-gatherer, the friendly, well-drilled team will be happy to snare dinner on your behalf. The simple but cheerful dining room has bulky tables, each of them concealing a compressor that aims high-pressure steam at the base of a bluestone hotpot. The segmented fish is added to the pot, followed by mushroom-studded fish broth, then a conical straw hat is set on top.
The steam does its fierce work, cooking the fish and turning the soup into a collagen-milky, rich, sticky medium in a few minutes. Not feeling like fish broth? You can select instead a spicy soup, grain porridge, or a herbal concoction with ginseng, jujube and goji berries that is best with the eel. My Murray cod was soft, sweet, mild (and bony – fillet-only fans beware).
A set menu is recommended to reduce overwhelm and make the most of the broth. Snacks include wagyu tartlets, fish skin chips.
