First Course at Fish House Steak & Grill
A year after opening Fish House Steak & Grill, John Caruso learns that Todd and Kristine Young are proving a second restaurant doesn’t have to live in the shadow of the first.
Fish House Steak & Grill sits on the Mooloolaba Spit, close enough to the wharf that the seafood on the menu doesn’t have far to travel. It’s a straightforward pitch – local produce, cooked without a lot of fuss – and a year in, it’s clearly working. Bookings are hard to get on a Friday night.
Down the road on Mooloolaba Esplanade sits its older sister, Bella Venezia, which has been part of Mooloolaba’s esplanade since the early 1980s. Under the stewardship of Todd and Kristine it has now collected four consecutive AGFG Chef’s Hats. Fish House was never going to simply ride on that reputation. It had to earn its own, in a different cuisine, on a different patch – and it has.
“Fish House Steak & Grill for us was a new and exciting project,” Todd says. “We wanted to expand our portfolio and do something that was different to Italian. The idea was to duplicate the same service standards, the same food standards, but with a different cuisine.
“When the opportunity arose to take on a seafood restaurant right on the Wharf, it was an exciting opportunity, and to be honest, it has exceeded all expectations.”
Fish House Steak & Grill opened its doors on 27 August 2025 and seats 130 under an open, light-filled roof, with a private dining room for 14 and a dry-aged beef cabinet as a showpiece.
Todd and Kristine took ownership on 1 July last year and shut the doors for seven weeks, orchestrating a full refurbishment on a tight deadline.
Key staff crossed over from Bella Venezia to help get the new kitchen up and running, among them Executive Chef Ben Achurch, whose track record at the flagship restaurant had already earned three consecutive Chef’s Hats. These days Ben splits his time between both kitchens.
“To see this business transform and truly blossom has been a pleasure,” Todd says of the turnaround, before adding that having two venues so close together has proven more of an asset than a challenge.
Staff move across both venues as demand requires, though loyalty runs deep at both.
“I’ve got people at Bella Venezia who don’t want to move anywhere else, and I’ve got people at Fish who don’t want to go anywhere but Fish,” Todd says. “With two chef-hatted venues, the pool of people who fit the model is small, but when we find the right people, they stay with us for years.”
Growth, he adds, has a habit of doubling the workload rather than sharing it out.
“If I need an extra person at one venue because of continual growth, the chances are I probably need another at the other venue as well,” he says, which is less a complaint than a description of how a two-restaurant family business runs. The tally for year one at Fish House Steak & Grill is mouth-wateringly impressive: more than 9,000 steaks have left the grill, alongside 2,000 lobster rolls, 300 lobster tails and 3,000 serves of tempura Mooloolaba prawns.
Diners have worked through more than 1,000 Land Tasting Menus and 1,200 Sea Tasting Menus, the twin degustation’s built around the restaurant’s founding idea – that land and sea deserve equal billing on the plate. Perhaps the most telling figure is the smallest-sounding: 300 kilograms of sustainably-caught local Mooloolaba yellowfin tuna, landed a short walk from where it’s served.
Within four months of opening, Fish House was awarded a Chef’s Hat by the Australian Good Food Guide, placing it among the top one per cent of restaurants in the country, a rare result for a kitchen barely out of its fit-out. This year brought a second honour, when Fish House was named the Australian Good Food Guide’s Best Seafood Restaurant on the Sunshine Coast in the Readers’ Choice Awards, decided by public vote rather than a judging panel.
“We’re incredibly grateful for the support the community has shown us throughout our first 12 months, and we’re excited for what lies ahead,” Kristine says. “At the heart of Fish House Steak & Grill is a commitment to showcasing exceptional produce while championing the local growers, fishers and suppliers who make our region so special.
“Our ambition is to share the very best of the Sunshine Coast with the world and help put Mooloolaba firmly on the global culinary map. We’ve achieved so much in our first year, but this is only the beginning.”
It’s an ambition that tracks with what draws diners north from Brisbane and the Gold Coast for a table, people who make the drive home the same night and, by Todd’s account, tell him on the way out that it was worth it. Not bad going for a kitchen barely a year old.
Growth is the word Todd keeps returning to, not consolidation. A new spring menu, alongside refining the business model to move more people through service without losing the standard. Bella Venezia took the best part of forty years to become the institution it is now. Fish House has managed something close to a running start.
Whether that’s down to the concept, the standards imported from the Italian side of the business, or simply two operators who know their market, is beside the point. A little over a year ago, the doors were closed and renovations started with a seven-week deadline, nobody had room to miss. Now it’s booked out most nights of the week, wearing a Chef’s Hat and a Readers’ Choice award.
In hospitality, a full house on a Tuesday is the only review that counts, and Fish House has been collecting them since the week it reopened.
