REVIEW: It’s hard to resist brilliant cooking with one of the best backdrops on the planet.
Some places do not so much open as they land, fully formed, with a sense of ease that makes you sit back and think, ‘Yes, this is right’.
In conversations about hospitality, I often lean on what my team calls my cake analogy. A great venue, like a great cake, depends on ingredients coming together in proper harmony.
You need the fundamentals. You need balance. You need a bit of joy. Add too much of one thing, too little of another, or forget the basics and it will never rise.
But when everything settles just right and you add the right flourish at the right moment, the result is something you remember. Something that feels worth talking about.
If Tigerfish were a cake or a dessert, it would be a Bombe Alaska with sparklers: a little wild, a little theatrical and very hard not to smile at.
The combination of seasoned hospitality professional Mark Rutter, the sharp and deeply informed cooking of South Korean-born chef Stephen Ryu, and a fit-out that is both glamorous and genuinely fun would already be enough.
Add a Cottesloe Beach backdrop, DJ decks and a karaoke room for those inclined to some wholesome chaos, and you have a venue with its priorities very much in order.
Tigerfish knows exactly what it wants to be.
The design nods to the original bones of the Cottesloe Beach Hotel without getting stuck in nostalgia. The heritage shell gives the space its calm geometry, while breezy textures and warm timber soften the edges.
The drinks program follows the same focused thinking as the food. The cocktails draw on South-East Asian flavours and coastal ease, balancing sweet, sour, salty and spirit without leaning on gimmickry.
They feel built for the menu: from a bright tea-driven house punch to a ginger-laced martini that leans savoury and clean. A tequila spumoni offers a citrus snap, the shiso rum smash adds herbal lift and the rotating highball keeps things crisp and refreshing.
The sake list shows similar clarity. It moves with intention from sparkling styles to savoury junmai and junmai ginjo, then into the polished calm of daiginjo. A clouded nigori adds gentle richness, while a red rice sake brings earthy fruit and a deeper tone. Taken together, it is a confident lineup.
Naturally, when a place looks this good and feels this dialled in, you wonder if the food will meet first impressions. Will it be simply fine and is fine enough? The answer arrives quickly. The food here is not fine. It is very, very good.
The crispy rice cake with red curry hits the table first. Punchy, textural and confident. Prawn toast spring rolls with nuoc cham bring crunch and a bright snap of acidity. Pork potstickers come with kimchi butter for a hit of heat and funk that makes you grin before you even swallow.
Then come the wonton bombs with kalas-spiced tuna, betel leaf and west coast fish. They deliver flavour, aroma and temperature in one mouthful – the cooking trifecta – and they are a must order.
Eggplant is the dish that shows the kitchen’s understanding of detail. It is an ingredient that holds heat like almost nothing else, yet here it arrives velvety and steaming without tipping into mush, coated in a mapo sauce with satay butter and taro. It’s rich, fragrant and judged with real precision.
Just as you start wondering how you will fit in a main, the cooking shifts gear. The banana leaf roasted fish of the day is buoyant and aromatic. And the loaded fried rice is pure fun. Served chirashi style with prawn, scallop, mentaiko and omelette, it could easily stand alone as a meal. I have never described fried rice as fun, yet this is the creative genius of chef Ryu.
Dessert lands in exactly the right spot. Coconut sorbet with lychee granita, pineapple, mango and sago arrives like a fresh tropical exhale. Bright, clean and beautifully balanced.
You could come to Tigerfish for a date night or a business lunch and both would absolutely deliver. But my advice is this: bring four of your most fun, high-vibe friends, explore the cocktails, try a sake, and give into the kind of night that has you all texting each other from bed when you get home about how good that was.
And truly, we all need a night like that every now and then, don’t we?
Tigerfish
Cnr John St and Marine Parade
Cottesloe, WA 6011
• Georgia Moore is editor-in-chief of the WA Good Food Guide
